Lintas Pinstorm tieup digital advertising

Lintas and Pinstorm tie up for digital advertising

Lintas Media Group and Pinstorm announce a Rs100 crore Performance Alliance that will boost their offline and online offerings

Mumbai: Pinstorm and Lintas Media Group have announced a significant non-equity partnership. Designed to push clients to performance-driven media choices, the alliance between the two leading firms in the offline and online worlds will put further pressure on traditional agencies and media houses. This move is being seen in media circles as a positive step towards a more evolved phase in digital advertising.

Lynn de Souza of the Rs1,800 crore Lintas Media Group said, “We don’t think that just buying a digital agency will contribute to our client’s success. What attracted us to Pinstorm was their pure adherence to pay-for-performance – a vastly different model to the commission and retainer structures that Indian clients are used to. We think this model can go a long way in bringing accountability and transparency to investments in advertising.”

The pay-for-performance model was pioneered by Google and Yahoo, and has been pushed further by Pinstorm, India’s only MNC digital ad firm, where the agency pays for the media and the creative – and the advertisers just pays for results.

Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm said, “around the world, media costs are going up and clients are cutting commissions and retainers because they are unable to see how advertising is performing. At Pinstorm, we simply ask the client to pay for the prospects or results we deliver. Our alliance with Lintas comes from our joint belief that the Rs16,000 crore Indian advertising industry needs a new model. By working together, pay-for-performance advertising can be brought into the mainstream of advertiser choices.”

The alliance estimates that they will be able to drive an incremental Rs100 crore of advertising to move over from traditional models to a performance-driven model in the next 12 months. “Digital advertising accounted for just 4% of spend in India last year. With this alliance and other efforts, investments in digital advertising will cross the Rs1,000 crore mark, almost 100% growth over last year” said Murthy.

“An industry only grows when there is pay-for-performance. For too long have clients worried that their agencies and publishers are simply recommending higher media spends because that’s how they earn more. That era will soon end. Our work with Pinstorm is to collaborate on clients to give performance-driven options initially across digital media - but we hope over time to grow the same basis to traditional media like broadcast, print and outdoor too” added de Souza.

The Lintas-Pinstorm alliance will first come into effect on Lintas’ roster of clients and soon expand to other businesses. Lintas Media Group is among the largest media agencies in India, managing a spend of over Rs1,300 crore on broadcast, print, outdoor and other media for clients like Idea, Bajaj Auto, Maruti Suzuki, ITC, Sony, UTI and Naukri.

Pinstorm is the largest independent digital advertising firm in South East Asia, with offices in Bombay, Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing and Santa Clara in Silicon Valley. It uses proprietary technologies across search engine marketing (SEM) search optimization (SEO), email, SMS advertising, online display advertising, online community creation and blog management to handle the performance advertising needs of Yatra, Jet Airways, Taj Hotels, Share khan and HSBC in India.

The alliance is effective immediately and in place across all advertisers in India.

Google Code Blog: Introducing the Google Visualization API

We spend a fair amount of time on data display and visualization projects at Google, and we have found that the "last mile" of these projects tend to become full projects in and of themselves.

Thus when we acquired Gapminder last year, we were excited by the opportunity to use Gapminder's powerful visualization techniques to bring new life and usefulness to Google datasets. And we were not alone -- the web is home to a vibrant community of developers who build amazing visualization applications.

With the community in mind, we're please to introduce the Google Visualization API, which is designed to make it easier for a wide audience to make use of advanced visualization technology, and do so in a way that makes it quick and easy to integrate with new visualizations.

There are a two key elements here: simplicity and ubiquity. We hope we nailed the first, but of course we want to hear your feedback on that. The second will take more time, but we hope we're on the right path. We're releasing this API at an early stage so we can get continuous feedback and be sure we're building it the right way.

This launch is in tandem and in cooperation with the Google Docs team, who just announced support for gadgets and the Visualization API in spreadsheets. This includes a set of gadgets created by Google and several other companies, including some that add pivoting, grouping, and other new functionality to your spreadsheets. You can see all of those in our 'featured' list within the visualization gallery, which includes the Gapminder Motion Chart that has proven especially popular among within Google.

We hope you're as excited about the Google Visualization API as we are -- please be sure to tell us what you think. We'll also be at Google I/O on May 28-29 for deeper discussions about the API or visualization techniques in general.

Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta Download

Yahoo Messenger 9.0 Beta Download

Your friends come first

Enjoy a fun new look, with more room for friends' images, info, updates.

Express your true self

Add your personality with new Emoticons, plus new skins.

Share your passions

Use Flickr to swap photos (and always keep all your friends in the picture).

Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta Download

How Useful Are DNS Block Lists

DNS block lists can be a nice way to reduce the amount of email spam received by a mail server. They are usually cheap, easy to install and resource-friendly. As the name implies they work with the help of domain name servers. If a mail server uses DNS block lists it queries a name server for the address of a name built from the hostname or IP address of the sending mail server and the name of the block list. Depending on the result of the query the mail message gets accepted or rejected.

Probably the first DNS block list was the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) started by MAPS (Mail Abuse Prevention System). It is now a service you have to pay for but the majority of DNS block lists is still available for free.

It is easy to include DNS block lists in the configuration of the most common mail servers (sendmail, postfix, exim, ...). The block lists are integrated on the server side and you save bandwidth because you don't need to receive the spam mails. The connections are rejected in the SMTP dialog between the sending and the receiving mail server. DNS block lists use a very low amount of resources from your mail server compared to spam or virus filters that have to analyse the contents of your mail messages.

Of course there are disadvantages also. Probably the most important disadvantage is that you are outsourcing the decision whether you accept or reject mails from a certain source. If the sending mail server is listed in one of the blocklists you are using you will reject every mail from this server. Usually you will not know the administrator of the blocklist but you have to trust him that he adheres to the policy of the blocklist. Even if the admin is trustworthy sometimes there will be mail servers listed that should not be on the blocklist. Imagine an ISP who has a lot of good customers but one customer who is a spammer. If the spammer sends out spam over the mail server of the ISP, the mail server may get listed on a blocklist. It will need some time until the ISP solves the problem with his bad customer and gets his mail server off the blocklist. In the meantime you will not receive mail from the good customers of this ISP. Another problem is that DNS blocklists don't live forever. If a blocklist is abandoned and your mail server still tries to query it, you may block mails that you wanted to receive.

So how useful are DNS block lists after evaluating the pros and cons? They can be very useful to lower the overall CPU usage of your anti spam strategy. It is advisable to use a small number of carefully chosen blocklists. If you are using a block list, subscribe to the mailing list or newsletter of the organisation who runs the block list. That way you will take note of any problems that the block list may have and you will be informed if it gets shut down. DNS blocklists should never be your only strategy against spam. They should be combined with other mechanisms to help keeping spam out of your inbox.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andreas_Stiasny

FTE Outsourcing Offshore story

The way we do business has rapidly changed in the last few years, technologies of telecommunication, information technology and media have of course been a major catalyst. The most recent and in some sense the oldest trend has been outsourcing and contract based work-FTE. Though both ideas have been here since the industrial revolution, their combination and organization plus the new technologies has led to a revolution in the way work is done.

To increase their flexibility, economy and creativity, many large and small companies have developed a strategy of focusing on their core business, and offshore outsourcing or work or FTE hiring.

Frequently, work is offshored in order to reduce labor expenses, to enter new markets, to tap talent currently unavailable domestically or to overcome regulations that prevent specific activities domestically as well.

Outsourcing Vs Offshoring

Outsourcing is the practice of using outside firms to handle work normally performed within the company. Offshoring is also a type of outsourcing; it involves having the outsourced business functions of the company done in another country.

Offshoring is sometimes contrasted with outsourcing.

• Companies subcontracting in the same country would be outsourcing, but not offshoring.

• On the other hand a company moving an internal business unit from one country to another would be offshoring, but not outsourcing.

• A company subcontracting business to a different company in another country would be both outsourcing and offshoring.

Offshoring Vs Full Time Equivalent

FTEhiring is a system which hires employees who work on a contract basis, Having FTE of 1.0 means that the person is equivalent to a full-time worker; while an FTE of 0.5 signals that the worker is only half-time.

Again when FTE is combined with outsourcing or offshoring it simply means that using the FTE standards you are subcontracting business to a different company in another country

Reasons & Benefits

There are many numerous reasons why Offshoring -FTE & outsourcing are considered

Control capital costs- Cost-cutting may not be the only reason to outsource, but it's certainly a major factor. Offshoring releases capital for investment elsewhere in your business, and allows you to avoid large expenditures in the early stages of your business.

Increase efficiency- Companies that do everything themselves have much higher research, development, marketing, and distribution expenses, An outside provider's cost structure and economy of scale can give your firm a boost and advantage.

Reduce labor costs-This is another big incentive as hiring or training staff for short-term or peripheral projects can be very expensive. Offshoring enables you to hire expert and trained employees at the fraction of the cost.

Take new projects quickly- An offshoring firm has the resources to start a project right away. Handling the same project in-house might involve months to hire people, train them, and provide the support they need. And if a project requires major capital investments the startup process can be even more complicated.

Focus on your core business-Offshoring can help your business to shift its focus from peripheral activities toward work that serves the customer, and it can help managers set their priorities more clearly.

Give you competitive edge-Outsourcing can help small firms by giving them access to the same economies of scale, efficiency, and expertise that large companies enjoy.

Reduce risk- Outsourcing providers assume and manage this risk for you, and they generally are much better at deciding how to avoid risk in their areas of expertise

Not many businesses really understand the benefits of outsourcing. It's true that outsourcing can save money, but that's not the only reason to do it.

• Staffing flexibility
• Acceleration of projects and quicker time to market
• High caliber professionals
• Ability to tap into best practices
• Knowledge transfer to permanent staff
• Cost-effective and predictable expenditures
• Access to the flexibility and creativity of experienced problem solvers
• Resource and core competency focus
• Reduce overheads, free up resources
• Avoid capital expenditure
• Offload non-core functions
• Enhance tactical and strategic advantages
• Spread your risks
• Focus scarce resources on time-critical projects

Finale

Offshoring can not only reduce costs but can also make you a global player in a very short time and within limited resources. There is almost a never ending list of services and tasks that could be Offshored, some are fairly rare, but others, such as IT and Human Resources, are becoming very common indeed.

New Facebook COO

New Facebook COO will be organization czar

On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it had hired six-year Google veteran Sheryl Sandberg as its chief operating officer, a big move as the hot social network attempts to convince the Valley that it's here to stay and slated to keep growing fast.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had a few minutes to chat on the phone about Sandberg's new role at the company.

The 23-year-old CEO insisted that Sandberg isn't a pure replacement for outgoing executive Owen Van Natta. From what it sounds like, her role will be significantly more extensive. Not surprisingly, she's going to be in charge of keeping things running smoothly--and probably keeping Facebook's young executives in line, too.

Do you think this is going to help advertiser confidence?
Mark Zuckerberg: The reason why we did this is primarily to scale all of our different business operations. Advertising is definitely one piece of that, and Sheryl has a lot of experience there. But the primary reason why we did this is just because Facebook is scaling very quickly, and if we want to reach our goal, which is to help everyone in the world communicate more efficiently, we need to build an organization that's going to grow and scale globally. And someone like Sheryl, who has experience doing this, is going to be a tremendous asset to us in doing that.

Sheryl Sandberg is the latest in a handful of high-profile Google employees hired at Facebook (i.e. Benjamin Ling, Gideon Yu). Are we seeing a "Google-ization" of Facebook here?
Zuckerberg: I think there are a lot of really interesting companies out there, and different experiences that people have before they joined here. (Sandberg) is really the only senior executive at the company who's come from Google so far. Gideon (Yu) was at Google for a very short period of time after YouTube was sold to Google, but that's not his primary experience.

What will be the first area where we see Sandberg's influence and expertise at Facebook?
Zuckerberg: I think it's going to be subtle in a lot of ways because the nature of operations is that you're scaling an organization and powering other people. It's not that Sheryl is going to be doing all these things herself, but Facebook already has 500 employees and it's scaling very quickly, and I think it's just going to go a lot more smoothly with someone who's talented like her here.

How will her role be different from Owen Van Natta's role as chief operating officer and then chief revenue officer?
Zuckerberg: Well, they were different roles. Owen, as chief revenue officer, was mostly focused on direct sales, which is what we have now, and business development. He was just focused in different areas. I wouldn't view this as really a replacement there, as other people have characterized it. Owen was doing that role, and he wanted to be a CEO, and I think Owen did great work here and I'm supporting him in doing that. With bringing in a COO, we just decided it was the right time for him to go and do that. Sheryl's role is going to be managing sales and business development but also a handful of other things.

So there's going to be all the different sales channels, direct and inside and online sales, and human resources, and marketing, communications and public policy...Sheryl will be in charge of all these different operations, and our consumer operations, the user operations group. It's a large organization for someone to oversee, and she's going to be primarily responsible for scaling that organization and scaling those operations.

What do you expect Facebook's employee head count to be at the end of 2008?
Zuckerberg: We have our projections that say we will probably get very near, maybe over a thousand, but it really just depends. We're hiring very aggressively just in terms of finding as many talented people as we can, and right now we're having a lot of success in doing that. So I think there's a good chance that we'll continue to grow very quickly this year, but I think over the long term in order to meet our goal just in terms of building this communication system that helps everyone in the world communicate more efficiently, that's going to require building a substantial business, and probably a lot of people all over the world, and we're going to need an organization, a set of operations that can do that. Sheryl's going to be really critical to helping us do that.