TechnoCloud

Time’s gadget of the year may well have been the Droid Android phone, but the iPhone still retains its place as my gadget of the year.

However, for all the iPhone’s improvements in graphics, the PSP Go gets special mention for delivering high end gaming experience on a handheld. The iPhone has been great for snacking, but the PSP remains my leading device for mobile game feasting!

Small fry to The Sun, which reckons it’s been the UK’s best handheld for the last 40 years with this wonderful parody of Apple’s iPhone advertising.

Google has announced an agreement to acquire AdMob, the mobile ad network and technology provider, for $750 million in stock.

The move increases further Google’s share of the advertising market after 2007’s key acquisition of DoubleClick and the mobile market after the launch of its rapidly growing operating system, Android. With mobile advertising still in its infancy and lagging behind the growth in media consumption on mobile devices (as we saw with the desktop internet), this gives Google a significant early share of the market both in terms of ad volumes and ad technologies.

Condé Nast are repurposing the entire December issue of GQ, with the same ads and articles, into an iPhone app. The app will be launched the same day the print issue will appear and will be priced at $2.99, two dollars less than the print version.

The app will also include e-commerce, audio and video functions. Turned sideways, the iPhone displays the magazine in its traditional print layout. Users can flip through pages sequentially and zoom in and out of each page. As the app is a full replica of the magazine, it will count towards its ABC paid circulation figures.

iPhone users generally view ads in paid apps unfavourably, so it will be interesting to see the consumer reaction to largely a print business model and content (newsstand, plus ads) on the iPhone.

The challenge in getting users to click on ads is well known, but an inspired piece of creative for Pringles plays on this by including a mini-story within the ad which reveals itself through a seemingly never ending number of clicks (I gave up at 20), earning itself a gold Cyber Lion award in the process.

See it in action here.

Spotify’s music streaming service is trialling its first audiobook, appropriately enough Chris Anderson’s much hyped ‘Free: the future of a radical price’. This is available to users in the UK only.

Spotify remain coy over whether this will become a business for them, but hint that a successful trial may lead to further additions to the catalogue: “This is the first audiobook we’ve ever included in our catalogue. We’re going to trial it, see what people think and who knows, maybe this is the start of something new for us…”

While Chris Anderson’s Free is by its subject matter an obvious candidate for ad-supported streaming, it will be interesting to see whether other publishers follow his lead. It does open up the question of whether Spotify will expand into other media, extending to podcasts or even video.

As regular readers will know I’ve been running an ad trial on the site to learn more about ad placement with a view to sharing the knowledge on here and with colleagues.

Having completed a short test of Google Adsense Link Units vs Ad Units, I’m going to follow up with one of the questions I raised about unit type over positioning.

As a result, there are two ad units between the post and the comments to see if the higher click through rates of the link units in that position would result in higher overall revenue using ad units.

I’ll admit that these two ads are more obtrusive than I would like, so I’ll look to change them once I’ve gathered enough data to share.

If you have your own experiences to share, please do so in the comments.

As part of the ad trial I’ve been running on the blog, I said I’d keep readers in touch with progress as thanks for putting up with the ads on a previously ad-free blog.

In part two of the trial, I experimented with adding Adsense Link Units, between the article and the comments on individual posts.

It’s been about five weeks now and I have sufficient data to make a judgement for this blog at least.

The Link Units on the page have been clicked on nearly twice as much, but they have got a much lower CPM (virtually nothing, but statistically 25 times less), no doubt the requirement for the second revenue-generating click on reacing the Google search engine results page playing its part.

This does raise the question about trialing Ad Units in that space to see the relative click-through rates, although I’ll hold off for a while as Technocloud is not a revenue generating exercise.

Needless to say I’m removing the Link Units to declutter the site, but would be interested in hearing about other people’s experiences.

In a post last year, I explained that I was looking to run an ad trial on the site to test ad optimisation service Pubmatic as a way to test it for some much larger sites.

That test is now over, partly as this site doesn’t really get the traffic to provide precise enough data, but also because it became quickly apparent that Google Adsense was providing the higher quality ads and higher click-through rates of the ad networks tested.

So, to cut out the middle man, I’ve kept Google Adsense in the hopefully unobtrusive position on the right-hand column, as it’s fascinating to see the responses on different categories and pages.

I’m keen to learn more about the impact of ad positioning and ad unit, so if you’ll bear with me, I’m going to trial another style of unit on single posts in between the post and the comments.

Again, as payback for the ads, I’ll share the results in due course.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary edition, Esquire magazine wanted a truly standout cover.

As you’ll see from the embedded video below, they certainly achieved that despite the limitations of the animation, which resembles one of the earliest animated gif banners.

The limited edition cover came at a cost. Although the official figures have not been released, the cover price was $2 more and it was co-funded by Ford who released animated magazine ad inside the front cover. The work involved to reduce the batteries to a suitable size is rumoured to have cost a six figure sum. Good job they last for a minimum of three months and a projected average of six months to help the purchasers display some serious table top eye-candy for their extra investment.

Despite the cost, Esquire have created a memorable cover to celebrate their anniversary, which has generated a great deal of buzz from people uploading a video of their copy to YouTube to the inevitable technologists taking the e-Ink technology apart and posting the results online.

What’s interesting about this beyond the first-mover ‘gimmick’ is the potential convergence between print and digital. E-Ink also provide the screen reader technology for the Kindle and once the technology advances, it is not unreasonable to expect video and wi-fi to provide the a/v content and real-time updates that makes the web so competitive to print.

After several hosting hiccups in the last few months, I have been considering moving back to the free version of Wordpress available at Wordpress.com.

(The hosting service will remain nameless for now as they have been responsive in fixing the problems, if only they’d prevent them happening…).

As you’ll see on the sidebar, I have been carrying out an advertising experiment first using Pubmatic and now just with Google Adsense which means that for the first time this blog features a strip of (hopefully discreet) ads. I’d like to keep the experiment going on the free Wordpress.com service, but reading the Wordpress.com FAQs it seems that Google Adsense/Adwords are not permitted.

That’s not entirely true, as those using the VIP service are allowed to include ads. They do of course pay $500/month for the privilege and only if they are deemed famous enough to be accepted into the VIP club. Wordpress themselves do also occassionally use their own Google Adsense on your blog.

My advice would be to those looking to make money via Wordpress blogging is to build up your audience using the free Wordpress blog, while forking out the c.$15 a year for the domain and $10 a year for the domain mapping service. Once your blog reaches sufficient scale to justify using an Adsense or equivalent service, then upgrade to a hosting package. The cheaper hosting packages do run the risk of going down should your blog get Slashdotted or Dugg, so it pays to do your research into your bandwidth allocations.