The interactive music experience, called “The Wilderness Downtown,” was created by writer/director Chris Milk, with the band Arcade Fire and Google.

Drawing upon Street View in the Google Maps API as well as features made possible by HTML5, the team created what they hope is a unique and deeply personal experience of traveling down the streets where you grew up. All this is set to Arcade Fire’s new song “We Used to Wait” off their newly released album “The Suburbs.”

“The Wilderness Downtown” was made possible by recent developments in modern web technologies and modern browsers, and was built with Google Chrome in mind. As such, it’s best experienced in Chrome or an up-to-date HTML5-compliant browser.

You can launch the project and learn more about it on the Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.

Enjoy the trip down memory lane!

Source: Google Creative Lab

Pay-Pal co-founder Max Levchin started Slide in 2004. The company’s value peaked in 2008 when it was estimated to be worth $500 million.

David Glazer, engineering director at Google, wrote on the company’s official blog, “While we don’t have any detailed product plans to share right now, we’re thrilled to welcome Max and his very talented team to Google.”

According to TechCrunch, a source close to the acquisition said Google agreed to pay US$182 million to acquire Slide plus US$46 million extra in employee retention bonuses, bringing the total investment up to $228 million.

In 2007 Slide was the largest Facebook app supporter with big hits including Top Friends and SuperPoke.

The digital industry assumes Slide will help Google boost its current business direction towards stronger social media capability. Despite pulling the plug on social networking service Google Wave last week, the company is still rumoured to be working on social media platform Google Me.

Source: campaignasia.com

Look no more - this week WhatTheFuckIsMySocialMediaStrategy.com launched! (PR agencies and social media experts across the web, watch out!).  WhatTheFuckIsMySocialMediaStrategy.com can a tell startups to “identify relevant and compelling hooks”, “humanise the brand by driving the audience conversations”, and combine a bevy of many other pleonastic words to forge taglines that are utterly and completely devoid of meaning. Free of charge!!!

The site works by jumbling a few verbs (facilitate, foster, leverage) and nouns (‘word of mouth’, buzz, ‘branded utilities’) into a sentence that sounds impressive but means absolutely nothing.

The site is inspired by the similarly titled WhatTheFuckShouldIMakeForDinner.

Source:  Techcrunch

It’s already been widely reported that Google is prepping a music download service tied to its search engine for a late-year debut (to be followed by an online subscription service next year).

Now, music industry sources tell the NY Post that the search giant’s iTunes killer is on — and perhaps even ahead of — schedule.

“Google’s plan to challenge Apple’s dominance in the music marketplace is advancing more rapidly than expected,” reports The Post. “The search giant’s Android whiz, VP Andy Rubin, is said to be having ‘accelerated’ talks with a music-industry group publishing firm in hopes of gaining digital publishing rights to as many songs as possible to enable the launch of a Google Music store.”

According to 9to5Mac.com, “Google’s attempt to build an iTunes-killer is gaining momentum with the search giant now speaking to publishing companies after successful discussions with record labels.”

“Google is said to be in ‘accelerated’ talks with the Harry Fox Agency, which is the largest owner of mechanical music licenses in the Unites States, to build out its Music store,” notes Fortune. “Google would need to have Harry Fox signed up before it could start selling major label music on its own … Google currently sells lots of music, though it fulfills orders through Amazon and iTunes.”

“Successful discussions with record labels, followed by the promise of an excellent cloud based service that can be accessed via Android, makes Google’s impending music service incredibly appealing,” writes MacStories.com. “With the opportunity to instantly open-up a new market to millions of new users and the desire to expand past Apple’s iron fist, there’s an interest here that can’t be avoided.”

Last month, unnamed sources told The Wall Street Journal of Google’s music store. At the time, however, it reported: “Google’s proposals [to music industry execs] are still vague … and it’s unclear whether it has struck any deals with record labels so far.”

Presently, the digital music download business is dominated by Apple’s iTunes, with about a 28% market share, followed by Amazon and Wal-Mart, with 12% shares, respectively.

Citing multiple unnamed music industry sources in mid-June, CNet reported that Google could debut its own music service as early as the fall. In May, the search giant gave attendees to its I/O conference a demonstration of a Web-based iTunes competitor.

Read the whole story at New York Post et al..

Here is your chance to get all the Facebook facts you didn’t know that you wanted to know - Enjoy!

Source: Online PhD Programs for Mashable

Google made its name (and billions) by streamlining the search advertising process and increasing revenues. And that’s exactly what they want to do with display advertising now… How? By making the “overall display buying and selling process that much more effective.”

Display can certainly benefit from increased efficiency. According to Google, 28% of a media dollar gets eaten up by friction (administrative costs) in the display ad market. If that sounds high, consider this. Neal Mohan, vice president of product management points out that the old school method purchasing TV advertising only wastes 2% of a dollar.

In addition to increased efficiency, Google is excited about the swaths of content moving online. As video and mobile products become more advanced and more media creators are working on content for the digital world, the advertising opportunities are expanding.

Not to mention Google’s in-house advancements and key acquisitions + the scale of properties like YouTube. Google’s video site surpassed Yahoo in the summer of 2008 as the world’s second most popular search engine. Over the last year, the number of display advertisers running ads on YouTube has increased 10 times. In North America alone, 50 million impressions are served on YouTube’s homepage each day. Which means inventory on the homepage is often sold out.

Today at Google’s New York headquarters, the company wanted to reiterate that selling display advertising is not an experiment for the company. According to Barry Salzman, managing director of media and platforms in the Americas, display advertising is “a major part of Google’s business.”

“We’re bringing search together with display,” he says. The company is able to combine their media power with an impressive technology offering. “That’s the power of Google display.”

Flash and rich media a substantial portion of US ad impressions

To underline why Google is making this move a recent study from comScore shows that US ad impressions are up 15 percent over the same period last year

Key findings are that overall ads are getting bigger. Leaderboard banners (728 x 90) were the most commonly viewed display ad by size. While the study takes pains to point out subtle differences in whether the square is more popular than the rectangle as a creative format, it’s more notable that pop-ups continue to be near-extinct,

Jeff Hackett, comScore SVP pointed out that ”One of the several drivers of strength in this market has been the innovation occurring with respect to ad units, as larger and more engaging creative ad formats are employed.”

Source: eConsultancy

The University of Toronto’s Avi Goldfarb and MIT’s Catherine E. Tucker examined 2,892 distinct web ad campaigns on different websites. They then surveyed almost 900 people for each campaign.

Goldfarb told AdAge:

“We were interested in the basic question of whether ads work better if they’re targeted and more in your face, more visible,” “We were expecting some kind of linear effect, that you would get a particular jump in effectiveness — but the opposite is the case.”

Both matching advertising to its surrounding content and increasing an ad’s obstructiveness have proven to be effective ways of getting people’s attention online. But the study found combining both methods actually decreases people’s interest in clicking on ads.

And while its been years now that marketers have been proclaiming the simple banner ad dead, Goldfarb and Tucker actually found boring banner ads to be about as effective as highly targeted, obtrusive ads online. When a prominent ad is targeted, the study found people were only 0.3% more likely buy a product than when shown a regular banner with no contextual relevance.

According to Goldfarb:

“That has implications for more sensitive areas like finance and health sites. For people who are more privacy sensitive, there was an overall negative effect. For them, these ads don’t work at all.

“Our results show privacy matters in something of a subtle way in online advertising. Sometimes privacy violations are fine, sometimes they’re not.”

Privacy groups are quick to argue for the regulation of online advertising, but if targeted ads don’t prove effective with consumers, the issue isn’t likely to get to that point. Why would marketers pay more for ads that don’t work?

According to the study:

If advertisers replace ads that combine contextual targeting and high visibility with the standard ads that our estimates suggest are equally effective, we provide back-of-the-envelope calculations that suggest advertisers could cut ad spending by over 5% without affecting ad performance.”

Goldfarb and Tucker found that the larger ads simple magnified people’s perception of being manipulated by advertising online:

“Results suggest a possible explanation for the growing bifurcation in internet advertising between highly targeted plain text ads and more visually striking but less targeted ads.”

It’s common knowledge that customers often avoid looking at banner advertising online. Getting them to pay more attention to advertising that is relevant to their interests is a major goal of digital marketers. But if people are going to get turned off by more relevant ads, perhaps we’ve finally found an online marketing privacy breach that customers won’t ignore.

Source: Econsultancy

The Social Media presentation includes 27 slides on:

• Social Media Marketing Statistics
• Definitions and Explanations of Social Media
• Free and Paid Social Media Tools
• Social Media ROI Statistics

See the report online here or download the entire presentation as a PPT file or PDF file for your own use.

The service basically helps you find information you need (tadaaaaaa ) - so when you complete a search related to the World Cup, you’ll see live scores, latest results and match schedules at the top of your search results. You’ll also find TV broadcast information and quick links for game recaps, live updates, standings and team profiles. The feature works on all Google search domains in 44 languages, including Afrikaans, Amharic, Swahili and Zulu.

Example searches: [world cup], [world cup spain] and [world cup group g]

Caffeine indexing system
Also just announced is Google’s completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. This new indexing system provides fresher results for web searches (nearly 50 percent fresher than Google’s previous system) and it’s the largest collection of web content Google has ever offered. The reason for building Caffeine was to help us meet the evolving expectations of their users, especially as content across the web becomes more global and is published in real time.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Several recent reports have drawn some interesting conclusions about the online advertising market in the Asia-Pacific region. The Nielsen Company recently reported double digit growth for Q1 2010 advertising spending in Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand over the same period in 2009.

Nielsen’s Hong Kong office also recently reported that online ad revenues reached HK$255 million ($32.7 million in US dollars) in Q4 2009 to boost full year spending to HK$869 million ($111.4 million US). The total number of advertisers and campaigns more than doubled from Q4 2008 to Q4 2009, signaling an acceptance of online ads among advertisers in Hong Kong.

The Interactive Advertising Bureaus of Australia, New Zealand and Singapore also recently released their latest data for total advertising spending, with the Web leading the way. Online advertising in Australia was up 17% in the first quarter of 2010 year-over-year, propelled by a surge in search and directory spending. In May, IAB New Zealand reported a 12.3% increase in Q1 2010 and IAB Singapore estimates that online spending grew 30.2% from the first half of 2008 through the first half of 2009.

It all boils down to one point: Online advertising saw sustained growth throughout Asia-Pacific, compared to a 9.8% contraction in total advertising spending worldwide from 2008 to 2009 as estimated by ZenithOptimedia.

It’s not anything new to say that Asia is a huge opportunity for marketers looking to reach out overseas to seemingly untapped masses. What this data does show is that online advertising is booming in the Asian market, and for the first time, marketers won’t be able to count on Asia being “untapped” much longer, at least online.

Source: eMarketer