Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz is arguably the most powerful person in our industry. I'm thrilled that he'll be joining us onstage for "ad:tech inspire" at the Javits Center in New York on November 8th. Mr. Leibowitz will give a short presentation and then sit down with a panel of industry experts, but I want to crowd source at least a FEW of the topics we'll kick around-- I'll also be interviewing him here at iMedia Connection.
The other ad:tech inspire panelists are Dave Morgan of Simulmedia, Grace Liau of Vivaki and Scott Meyer of Evidon.
We're working on the session description now and I'll share it soon, but in the meantime please respond in comments with the questions you think we should ask.
And learn more about ad:tech New York here.
Archive for Brad Berens 
What should we ask FTC Chair Jon Leibowitz at ad:tech NY?
Ecosystem Shakeups: Q&A with Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton… Or… Amazon, Apple & Android: Oh My!
Matthew Ingram’s GigaOm article last week, “Amazon shows media companies the future of the web,” provocatively argued that the e-commerce giant’s Kindle Cloud Reader was more than just a way around the 30% cut that Apple charges for books purchased via the Kindle app on the iPad or iPhone.
What the e-book retailer has also done is provide a great example of how media companies should be looking beyond the world of apps to the future of the web: one in which websites behave like apps, thanks to the magic of HTML5, and publishers can get the benefits of both without having to sell their souls to one app-store provider after another.
Passionately pro-HTML5, Ingram’s article suggests that after the last few years of of app frenzy we might well be seeing the decline of apps.
Seeking additional insight into the future of native handset and appliance apps vs. HTML5 web apps, I reached out to Scott Kveton, founder and CEO of Urban Airship, which is “a mobile services provider powering in-app communications and purchases for tens of thousands of mobile apps” and serves companies like ESPN, Tapulous, Groupon, dictionary.com, misnbc.com and Newsweek.
Scott Kveton
Prior to Urban Airship, Scott worked at companies including Amazon.com, Rulespace,... Read more
Portland Startups to work with Target, Coca-Cola, Nike, Google, Wieden + Kennedy
Our industry has relapsed into a high digital startup fever, but this time with a new twist—brands working directly with entrepreneurs in order to find the next hot digital companies at the earliest possible stage and to stay at the sharpest edge of marketing innovation.
We've seen this elsewhere with the PepsiCo10 in New York and Europe, the Brandery in Cincinnati, and now PIE, the Portland Incubator Experiment, is about to launch its fall class right here in my town -- Portland, Oregon – smack dab in the middle of the Silicon Forest.
What's in it for the startup? $18,000, office space for three months and a rich community of other startups, PIE alums, the digital team at W+K and a mentor network that includes thought leaders from companies including Target, Coca-Cola, Nike and – as of just last week -- Google.
You don't have to be a Portlander to apply—applications so far have come in from the Northwest and as far as Vermont and Tennessee.
The deadline is August 8 at 11:59pm, so don't wait—get cracking on that application today!
Imagine being an entrepreneur with a nifty idea who gets to work directly with folks who have rich startup experience of their own... Read more
The Death of Media Channel Loyalty: What the New Pew Data Shows Us
Over the holiday weekend the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released data showing that 24% of internet users have placed calls online, up from 8% of internet users in 2007
The precise wording of the question was:
“Please tell me if you ever use the internet to make a phone call online, using a service such as Skype or Vonage? Did you happen to do this yesterday, or not?” This was the first time that we asked the question and specifically referred to Skype, the popular global service that was recently purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 billion.
Unclear from the press release was whether or not the researchers at Pew indicated that triple play TV/Internet/Phone service from Cable/MSO companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable also count as "making phone calls online," and if they did not then the number could spike higher than 24%.
This report is in keeping with a bunch of other recent findings about folks abandoning legacy land lines in favor of mobile-only, the ongoing debate about whether "cord cutting" in favor of IPTV services is a present or future danger to MSOs, and a general trend toward what my friend Shelly Palmer calls "WIW WIW WIW"... Read more
