Asina Pornwasin of The Nation reports, “In the second country to launch the iSnap multimedia augmented reality (AR) capability after Malaysia, Nation Multimedia Group’s three national newspapers – The Nation, Kom Chad Luek and Krungthep Turakij – will enable readers to watch video, scan through more photos and graphics, play games, and engage in social media communication as well as interactive advertising.  People can read newspapers with the iSnap multimedia capability through smart phones with the iPhone and Android ‘Nation News’ app from February 4. Nation News already has a download base of 208,000, which is expected to swell.” Read more

Joe Mandese of Online Media Daily reports, “In a surprising twist for the advertising industry, the hottest new model being developed by digital ad platforms is flipping the historic model between advertising and content: Instead of editorial or entertainment content being a conduit to distribute advertising, advertising is becoming a means for distributing content. The latest manifestation of this trend comes from Kontera, a company that helped pioneer the field of so-called ‘in-text’ advertising, which today will unveil an ambitious new initiative enabling advertisers to pull any form of content — including ‘owned,’ professionally produced or user-generated — directly into some new, dynamically served advertising units.” Read more

Anthony Ha of TechCrunch recently covered ad targeting company Sensegon: “Adtech companies are trying get better at demographic targeting, especially on mobile, but a startup called Sensegon aims to go a step further — targeting ads based on audience members’ personalities. To illustrate the concept, CEO Omer Efrat talks about going to a car dealership with his co-founder and CTO Tal Yaari. Efrat was more interested in engine power, while Yaari was more interested in gas consumption and safety. The salesman, Efrat says, knew intuitively to direct his pitch differently towards the two men. That’s the kind of intuition that Sensegon is supposed to replicate.” Read more

Yummly has announced “the launch of their redesigned website for their over 7.5 million unique visitors. Announced in conjunction with Yummly’s new revolutionary native advertising platform, Yummly Advertising, the new Yummly unveils a fresh design that delivers an easy, beautiful and innovative experience for the more than 183M cooking enthusiasts in America today… Yummly’s New Take on Cooking Launched in April of 2010 by cofounders David Feller and Vadim Geshel, Yummly’s food and recipe platform understands recipes from across the Internet and match them with its users’ tastes. Designed with simplicity and usability in mind, the new Yummly redesign mixes a scoop of high tech and a healthy dash of user feedback to provide a vastly improved user experience. The company will also be rolling out additional features and enhancements to the site over the next few weeks.”

Included in this update, Yummly has improved the site’s social integration: “As part of their individual settings, users can utilize the pervasive Yum button to share their discoveries and favorite recipes on Facebook. Simply ‘Yum’ a recipe and that endorsement will seamlessly appear as an update on the user’s Facebook Timeline and Newsfeed through Facebook Open Graph.” In addition, “Yummly Advertising’s native online advertising platform features integrated, contextual and useful ad placement within recipe search results, providing the Yummly cooking community with comprehensive brand suggestions.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Yummly

Derrick Harris reports that DataPop, an LA-based startup that uses Big Data to deliver custom online ads has raised $7 million in Series B funding. Harris states, “The company’s technology uses big data techniques such as natural-language processing and semantic association to automatically generate online ads based on what a web user has searched for. Essentially, the DataPop service works like this: DataPop gathers information on products, services, promotions and other relevant  data from customer web sites; it then automatically presents ads for those products, etc., when someone searches for something related on Google or Microsoft; the ads appear as if a human wrote them, not just a collection of keywords.” Read more

Once upon a time there was a semantic web startup dubbed Knewco, touting a knowledge discovery/ contextual advertising system for health care and life sciences content providers and advertisers (see this story). After a long journey toiling in the land of targeted health sites, it realized these prospects didn’t provide the best opportunity for its micro-targeted ad strategy. So, with a restructured management team and some fresh capital in place, in the latter half of 2011 it began a new quest: To become the semantic platform for premium publishers to help deliver personalized content recommendations and ads to readers and get more revenue, traffic and stickiness in the process.

Renamed Personalized Media, and now headed by CEO Rajiv Salimath, principal back in the Knewco days, the company’s technology now is in an advanced testing stage with premium publishers who will be white-labeling the system. Salimath can’t disclose their names, but suffice it to say that you’ve seen some of them prominently mentioned in these virtual pages before. So, what does Personalized Media bring to the party that’s attractive to some of these sites that already have taken steps – sometimes big ones – to bring semantic intelligence to their web presence?

From There to Here

When The Semantic Web Blog spoke with Salimath in late 2009, he discussed the technology’s prowess at understanding concepts and inter-relating them to other ideas. In its current incarnation, Personalized Media’s semantic search algorithms make it possible to find and suggest to readers other content – text, video, even apps, from the source itself, its associate properties or elsewhere on the web, depending on publisher preferences – that’s relevant to any word or term they highlight, or to the page at large. The content appears in a bubble at the user’s click.

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The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2012 report was just published, and among the findings is that efforts by most top news sites to monetize the web in their own right are still limited. Few news companies, it reports, “have made much progress in some key new digital areas. Among the top news websites, there is little use of the digital advertising that is expected to grow most rapidly, so-called “smart,” or targeted, advertising.”

Failing to make a lot more hay from digital ads is problematic for traditional news companies given the decline in print circulation and in its ad revenue, too. The report says that in 2011, losses in print advertising dollars outpaced gains in digital revenue by a factor of roughly 10 to 1, which it calls an even worse ratio than in 2010.

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A new article reports that Opera software is pushing further into mobile advertising by “acquiring a pair of mobile ad networks: U.S.-based Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising in the U.K. for $10 million total. The deals follow two years after Opera, best known for its Web browsers, bought mobile ad network AdMarvel. While AdMarvel caters mainly to publishers and developers, Opera CEO Lars Boilesen said the acquisitions of two mobile demand-side platforms would be complementary. ‘Opera is uniquely positioned to deliver end-to-end mobile advertising solutions to brands, agencies, publishers and mobile operators across the globe,’ he stated. Read more

The mobile ad space gets more and more interesting. Reports indicate that LinkedIn will be launching mobile advertisements as early as March, based on a statement by CEO Jeff Weiner during its quarterly earnings call that there are plans to monetize page views in “the mobile environment.” How much, if any, of that will be semantic-influenced is unknown, though it’s worth noting that LinkedIn has discussed its use of microformats in the past, such as hCard and hResume, and offered that it would be experimenting with RDF and FoaF.

And Facebook is hip to being in the mobile ad mix, too, acknowledging amid the IPO flurry that a weakness it had was monetizing its mobile user base. The Financial Times reported that it’s been in discussion with ad agencies about displaying sponsored “featured stories” in mobile users’ news feeds as well as to desktop users (see more about that and its intersection with the Open Graph protocol here).

Clearly, mobility matters to online advertising, and to semantically-minded players in the market. NetSeer has been on that bandwagon, for example, mobilizing its concept-based advertising through its relationship with Mobile Theory. Our friends in the Nordic region also have the semantic targeting capabilities that come along with ad serving technology from Emediate, an independent company that’s owned by ad pepper media International and provides web publishers with a system for managing, targeting and forecasting digital ads, including in the mobile space.

Now there’s news today from Twelvefold Media (formerly BuzzLogic) about the launch of Spectrum for Mobile, which takes its online targeting capabilities to the iOS and Android platforms. Spectrum is the company’s system for providing in real-time emotive-based ads by analyzing and understanding the content on individual pages (for further insight into how it works, see this story).

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Christopher Dawson has commented on Google’s recent changes to their privacy policy. Dawson writes, “I live, eat, breathe, work, and play Google and there aren’t many people more aware of Google’s business model and the amount of data it collects than I. So is it just sheer stupidity and naiveté that has me utterly embracing the Google ecosystem and relatively unconcerned about newly announced privacy policies that have caused so much consternation this week? Before you jump down to the talkbacks to tell me how stupid I really am, read on for another couple paragraphs.” Read more