Group items tagged

grocery comparison shopping site mySupermarket is today bringing its service the U.S. Operating something like a Kayak for grocery and drugstore products, the new U.S. version of mySupermarket lets shoppers find the best prices across top stores, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, Walgreens, Diapers.com, Soap.com, and Drugstore.com.

"According to the recent BIA/Kelsey forecast, U.S. social media ad revenues will reach $9.2 billion in 2016, up from $4.6 billion in 2012, representing a compound annual growth rate of 19.2 percent. According to the U.S. Local Media Forecast, the local segment of U.S. social media advertising revenues will grow from $1.1 billion in 2012 to $3 billion in 2016 (CAGR: 28 percent)."

Taking just the use of paid content on tablets in Q4 2011, Nielsen found that in the U.S., a majority of tablet owners have already paid for downloaded music, books and movies, with 62 percent, 58 percent and 51 percent respectively saying they have already made such purchases. The one area that really fell down in the U.S. was news, where only 19 percent said they had ever paid to read news on their tablets.

A pair of startling statistics was presented at the opening of the session: 16% of the U.S. population is currently Latino, while only 1% of U.S. marketing dollars are targeted toward reaching that population. Agencies share some of the blame for marketers' dropping the ball in the Hispanic marketing arena, said Lance Rios, founder of Hispanic social media platform Being Latino. He said that agencies frequently ignore requests for meetings to simply introduce his platform and explain how marketers might benefit from its use.

"Fast-growing Internet services like Netflix Inc. (NFLX), online movie purchases and DVD rentals from Redbox kiosks lifted U.S. home-video spending in the third quarter, countering the continued drop in DVD sales. Total sales rose 0.2 percent to $3.94 billion, the industry-backed Digital Entertainment Group said today in an e- mailed statement. Revenue from subscription streaming more than doubled while online purchases of movies and TV shows rose almost 38 percent, the group said."

"LevelUp operates a mobile payment network with 3,500 U.S. merchants in 20 U.S. markets, and 250,000 active users. The service recently rounded up $21 million in funding to scale growth. The new NFC-equipped terminals, along with a newly adopted "interchange zero" policy, are designed to accelerate LevelUp's maturation process."

"Unsurprisingly, Google is still at the top of the pile: it will account for 56% of all mobile ad sales. Perhaps more surprisingly, Twitter is doing better than Facebook in driving revenues where mobile ads are concerned: the world's biggest social network will make half as much as Twitter in mobile ads this year: $72.7 million versus $129.7 million, the analysts say. However that is bound to be reversed over time: eMarketer predicts that by 2014, Facebook will be making $629.4 million in mobile ads, compared to $444 million for Twitter, putting Facebook at a distant second to Google. Longer term, eMarketer predicts that U.S. mobile advertising will generate sales of $12 billion by 2016."

 U.S. Army is partnering with the Georgia Tech Research Institute to develop a fully functional sensor suite that could save the lives of soldiers in battle

"The number of U.S. TV households fell by 500,000, reflecting the popularity of online viewing and results of the 2010 census" "We have had no household formation over the past several years, and I believe there is a modest amount of cord-cutting happening in younger households and in lower-income households," said Paul Sweeney, Bloomberg Industries' director of North American research.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is saying that consumers appear more willing to pay for content delivered to tablets, so they are seeing that tablets will fuel growth in paid newspaper circulation in the U.S. Also forecasts growth in Mobile TV and its respective ad spend.

Advertisements in Skype first appeared in March. Initial advertisers included Groupon, Universal Pictures and Visa. These ads appeared in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. In a blog post at the time, Skype assured users its plan was to only show ads from just one brand per day in each market where advertising was sold. It also said the ads would not disrupt users' Skype experience with pop-ups or banners in the middle of calls.

Almost 60 percent of people worldwide say they expect brands to respond to social media comments regarding service at least most of the time. Nearly 60 percent of people globally have posted either a positive or negative social media comment about a brand regarding a service experience, said Arnold. Nearly three quarters (74 percent) of the respondents from China stated that they have posted comments regarding a service experience with a brand. Brazilian respondents were just behind China with 68 percent. U.S. and U.K. respondents both fell in with less than half saying they posted comments to social media platforms at 48 percent and 45 percent respectively.

, Ralph Lauren is conducting a contest on its Facebook page that allows parents in the U.S. and the U.K. to upload photos of their child. Friends and family can then vote on the child of their choice. The winning whippersnapper will be chosen from the group of children with the most votes, flown to New York and cast as a member of the RL Gang (pictured above).

Update from Nielsen on U.S. smartphones. Android - 29% iPhone - 27% BlackBerry - 27% WP7 (surprisingly?) - 10%

Stat on how the World Cup is being watched 48% more this year than last

used in daily 6.28

Interesting metric of comparison for time spent on the web. Will be crazy if U.S.