Googled today confirmed the acquisition pf GrandCentral Communications, a company that provides services for managing your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web.
They offer many features that complement the phone services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who’s calling. This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again. All in all, you’ll have a lot more control over your phones.
Google will move their technology over to Google’s network, a limited number of invitations will be available to register for a GrandCentral beta account. If you have a U.S. telephone number, you can sign up for an invitation at www.grandcentral.com. Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted access to the service.
July 3rd, 2007
Yahoo! today announced the launch of Yahoo! SmartAds, a new, innovative advertising platform that allows marketers to deliver powerful, tailored display ads to highly targeted audiences. SmartAds combines Yahoo!’s leading consumer insights and rich media capabilities with new ad serving technology that automatically converts marketers’ creative campaign elements and targeted offerings into highly-customized and relevant display ads.
“Yahoo!’s SmartAds gives marketers what they want from online advertising: the ability to deliver customized marketing messages to consumers, and still engage very large audiences with their brand,” said Todd Teresi, Yahoo!’s senior vice president of display marketplaces. “By enabling marketers to reach consumers on a more tailored basis and helping creative agencies support those customized campaigns, we can provide an even more engaging, relevant online experience to the more than 500 million users of Yahoo! branded products and services.”
Yahoo! SmartAds is powered by Yahoo!’s leading behavioral, demographic and geographic targeting capabilities and aim to connect users with what they are looking for based on their distinctive, expressed interests. For example, if a user is browsing for hybrid cars in Yahoo! Autos and has selected San Francisco as their default location in Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo!’s SmartAds platform can assemble and deliver a display ad in real time that showcases a hybrid vehicle from a major auto brand, as well as local dealer information and current lease rates. This provides a relevant experience to the user and allows the marketer to reach a user who is likely to become a customer.
In addition, Yahoo!’s patent-pending SmartAds platform allows advertisers and agencies to design a single set of individual creative components, provide Yahoo! with that artwork and a feed to their entire database of offers, then allow Yahoo!’s SmartAds technology to automatically generate the hundreds – if not thousands – of unique ad combinations based on those components. This helps advertisers and agencies scale to take full advantage of all of Yahoo!’s audience targeting capabilities while maintaining control over how their brand is presented.
“Yahoo!’s SmartAds is the breakthrough marriage of brand and direct marketing that advertisers have been waiting for,” said David Kenny, Chairman, Digitas and Publicis Groupe Digital. “By combining its huge audience, dynamic ad creation capabilities and deep knowledge of user interests, Yahoo! has developed a true innovation that will benefit agencies and its clients, especially companies with a large number of offers to present to many audience segments.”
Yahoo! is taking a phased approach to the SmartAds platform, making it available first on its owned and operated properties to travel industry advertisers in the U.S. The company has plans to expand it to additional vertical industries over the coming months and, in the future, deliver Smart Ads on its broader network of sites. In testing conducted on Yahoo! FareChase, SmartAds generally resulted in click through rates of two to three times higher than static, non-customized display ads using the same targeting and placement.
Yahoo! SmartAds furthers the company’s long-term advertising and publishing vision: To build the industry’s leading advertising and publishing ecosystem – both on and off Yahoo!’s network – and transform how advertisers connect to and engage with their customers. For more information about SmartAds or to view an online demonstration, visit: http://advertising.yahoo.com/smartads.
July 3rd, 2007
