What is Real Time Bidding? (RTB)

DigitalAdBlog.com

If you breathe and live in the Online Advertising space, you most definitively have heard the term Real Time Bidding or more commonly known as RTB. This is a relatively new technology to even people who consider themselves to be veterans of the online advertising industry. It is not an easy concept to grasp and I have found it easiest to understand by looking at it from multiple angles and hearing it defined from multiple people.

RTB in simplest terms is an auction between an advertiser and publisher, with the advertising server being the middle man. An advertiser has certain parameters of a perfect targeted user and a publisher has the target user surfing the site in which the ad can be displayed on their inventory. When a user loads a web page, in milliseconds the ad server will place a bid determined by algorithms on how targeted that…

View original post 129 more words

Marissa Mayer’s Unauthorized Biography .. via Business Insider

Wow.. just finished reading “The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography” by Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider; I couldn’t stop myself from sharing this here.

Its quite long, but quite the thriller in itself.. ! The part I liked best  ….

The past two years at Google — since she was, according to the rest of the world “demoted” — had been quieter than the first 11, but in many ways more challenging and exciting.

In local and geo, she’d taken over a much more massive operation than the one she’d been running at Google.

Whenever people asked her about the “demotion,” as Wolf and the other directors might over dinner, Mayer always pointed out how she had gone from managing 250 product managers in search to supervising a much larger, more diverse group of managers — 1,100 people managing engineering, design, marketing, and sales. Mayer would tell people that she was supervising some 6,000 contractors.

She’d figured out that by the fraction of the company, the geo and local piece that she was running was something like 20-25 percent of the company’s overall headcount.

The business challenges she’d dealt with in those years had been as diverse as the types of people she managed.

…….

Perspectives! When you know what to learn from an experience than worry about what ‘people’ think, you prepare yourself for the right opportunities! While Yahoo’s recent products have seen a huge turnaround and there’s news about increasing traffic, one must agree that there is have positive change for now.

 

 

The product manager vs the product owner

An interesting read about the worlds of Product Owners & Product Managers on Pragmatic Marketing. The article has quite an interesting start, read on to find more…

---

The Mythical Product Owner

Product Managers must quickly adapt to the Agile methodology, or face becoming sidelined. It is critical to understand the relationship between traditional and new roles within a delivery organization, particularly between the Product Manager and the Product Owner.

Barbara Nelson said in The Politics of Agile, “When product managers weren’t looking, the developers went agile.” Indeed, many Product Managers were taken by surprise at the speed of Agile’s adoption. And with the introduction of a new Product Owner role and its perceived overlap with the traditional Product Manager function, Product Managers have expressed some anxiety about the future of their role.

… Click Here for more

Amazon Vs. the Mall

This is a new one: Amazon being challenged by price competition. Up until now, consumer flock to the e-commerce giant for cheaper prices and reliable service. There seems to be a trend reversal now. Further improvements to the distribution network by Walmart, erosion of price differential due to tax collection on purchases, price matching games being played out by competing online retailers are fresh challenges to be overcome.

Read more of this at: A Problem for Jeff Bezos: The Mall is Becoming Cheaper Than Amazon on the The Wall Street Journal Blog

Reframing – the key to happiness – @ TEDxAthens

Rory Sutherland’s perspective on “Perspective”. An amazing talk which correctly points out the importance of perceived value.

An interesting point brought out – successful businesses have done well with finding solutions that meet the sweet spot between technology, economics & psychology.
Go ahead.. have a look.. 18 minutes well invested…

Google is preparing for screenless computers

Does it make sense to replace today’s keyboard on laptops with a touch panel & tactile feedback.. wouldn’t that take a few millimeters off the thickness? Albeit will that be able to stand the aggressive typing cost effectively?

Windows Phone based Smartphones register highest YoY growth

The International Data Corporation (IDC) released its latest Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker! 

Here are a few key takeaways from the report:

• Total Smartphone market grew 51% YoY
• Smartphones based on Windows Phone registered highest YoY growth in shipments (77.6%), followed by those based on Android (73.5%) & iOS (20%)
• Nokia registered a 73.2% YoY growth in Windows Phone shipments; while Samsung registered a 233% growth in the same category (perhaps due to the very low base figure)

“Revenge of the nerds” via The Economist

‘Revenge of the nerds‘, the article from The Economist delves in an interesting question. While financial technology firms will upset the apple-cart for bank & financial institutions, how far can this wave go? Developed economies are witnessing increasing application areas with the proliferation of smart phones, cloud based services and mobile banking platforms. How will incumbents create levers to achieve the  key success factor – gaining customer trust?

Wireless charging for mobile phones…

This article, here raised a few questions in my mind.

Companies, public connect with wireless smartphone chargers

More wireless charging solutions for mobile phone! So how will this impact adjacent industries?

Imagine mobile-phone based applications that swiftly eat through the mobile phone battery-life. For instance mobile apps/services based on multimedia ( like – video playback, video-on-demand, camera apps), location-based-services (read – GPS & internet services), augmented reality services etc.

Such solution providers must look at partnering with wireless charging eco-system providers. Wouldn’t wireless charging enable consumers recharge their phone-batteries & reduce adoption barriers for the said application categories?

Helping the cities, service providers assist smart city adoption

A report on Forrester by Jennifer Belissent indicates that local governments are increasingly investing in technology – with the intent of sustainably transforming various City functions and reaching the eventual objective of  building Smart Cities. Here’s a glimpse of the report through a blog by Ms. Belissent.

Cities, don’t go it alone. Service providers accelerate smart city projects. (via Forrester Research)