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Facebook Takes 31.2% of the U.S. Ad Display Market [REPORT]

Facebook now claims nearly a third of all U.S. display advertising impressions with 346.4 billion in the first quarter, more than double what it garnered in the comparable quarter in 2010, according to a new report.

The research, by comScore, estimates that Facebook now has 31.2% of U.S. advertising display impressions, up from 25.9% in the fourth quarter of 2010 and 15.6% in Q1 2010. At the current pace, Facebook will easily surpass 1 trillion impressions for the year.

The total number of U.S. impressions was 1.1 trillion for the first quarter. Facebook’s closest competitor is Yahoo’s network of sites, which claimed 10.1% of the market. Google, which is still relatively new to the display business, had 2.5%. The chart below shows Facebook’s rise since January 2010.

The latest numbers are proof, if anyone needed it, that Facebook’s advertising business is off to a running start in 2011. Facebook’s dominance in the market has prompted it to raise its ad unit prices by 40% according to one report while another speculated that the company’s IPO could be in the $100 billion range next year. Facebook’s business is growing faster than previously thought.

This recent report also notes that AT&T was once again the biggest display advertiser on the web with 19.4 billion impressions or 1.8% of the total market. Number two was Experian with 16.6 billion and 1.1%.

Image courtesy of Flickr, denneyterrio

More About: advertising, att, display advertising, facebook, Google, Yahoo

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Google Chrome Canary About To Hit OS X — Chrome 16 Due Before End Of Year

Users of Google Chrome are probably aware of the three channels you can use depending on how cutting edge you want to be (and how much you mind bugs): Dev, Beta, Stable. But ever since last year, there’s actually been a fourth channel as well that’s less publicized: Canary. Sadly, it has been a Windows-only build until now. But it looks like that’s about to change.

Given the talk in the Chromium development forums, it looks as if Google is just about ready to push out a Canary build of Chrome for OS X as well. In fact, it looks to already be working, they just need to add a download link somewhere so that people can actually get it. And that seems likely to happen soon.

Peter Beverloo, a developer who tracks Chrome and Chromium closely (and appropriately will soon be working at Google on the Chrome team) pointed out this morning that Chrome version 13 should be the first one to gain Canary status on OS X. As Beverloo notes:

While it has not been released yet, Google does seem to be ready to release Google Chrome Canary for Mac OS X systems. The browser cannot be made the default browser through the preferences and the release monitor says that the latest version was released today, using the same revision as Windows’ Canary.

Sure enough, looking over the “OmahaProxy” numbers that Google uses to keep track of Chrome progress across all platforms, there is now a “mac canary” build. And yes, it’s 13.0752.0 — just like the Windows branch. Both were updated today.

We’ve reached out to Google about the possibility of Canary finally coming to OS X, but have yet to hear back. But there are even more clues that this in the case tucked away inside threads on the development forums. For example, here you can see a screenshot of the Canary welcome screen on OS X — you’ll note the all-yellow icon, the key visual cue to let users know which build they’re using.

Why care about Canary? Well, if you want to absolutely be on the bleeding edge of Chrome, it’s the place to be. Technically, Canary is a pre-Dev build of the software that gets automatically updated daily (or so) with the best stuff from Chromium. Sure, you could just download Chromium itself, but that is far less stable as it’s updated many times a day. And you have to manually upgrade it. And plug-in and codec support can often be lacking.

Plus, the entire point of Canary is that you can install it and run it alongside another version of Chrome. This means that you could keep the stable version on your system for your real work, and load up Canary when you want to play with the new Chrome features that won’t be released for weeks or months. For example, Google has just released Chrome 11, but Canary is already on Chrome 13.

Of course, Google has been trying to downplay the version numbers now that they’re upgrading the browser every six weeks or so. But this hasn’t stopped them from touting new releases every so often.

And one more thing: looking over the Chromium development calendar, it looks as if the plan right now is to at least get to Chromium version 16 before the end of this year. That’s set to branch in October, which should give Google plenty of time to get Chrome 16 out the door before the new year. For some context, last May, Google unveiled Chrome 5.

Update: Yep, Google Just Pushed Chrome Canary For Mac Out Of The Nest

Switched On: Honeycomb or the highway

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

During the holiday season of 2009 when netbooks were the hot commodity, Apple lost share in the PC market. It had nothing to compete with the sunken prices and shrunken sizes of those miniature laptops. PC vendors such as ASUS and Acer, on the other hand, did well in the netbook segment, as they could call on their expertise in building inexpensive Windows notebooks.

After the iPad’s introduction, though, the tablets were turned. While many PC vendors loathed the low profitability of netbooks, they were now faced with competing with their own products. With the exception of HP, which shelled out billions of dollars for webOS, the iPad set PC vendors scrambling to choose which operating system might best compete. Is it Windows, the devil they know, or Android, where they have far less experience than competitors from the smartphone market?

Switched On has already taken on the role that Windows might play in future tablets, but what about Honeycomb? In contrast to the original version of Android, which was in the works prior to the introduction of the iPhone, Honeycomb arrived a year after the iPad. Android licensees, particularly smartphone vendors, surely beseeched Google for a tablet-optimized version of their preferred mobile OS. But Google may also be a victim of the iPad’s jujitsu.

Continue reading Switched On: Honeycomb or the highway

Switched On: Honeycomb or the highway originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 May 2011 20:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Future of Microsoft Office

2011-04-24_1617

Productivity software forms the crux of daily tasks for many of today’s workers, no matter what field they find their employment in. The reigning king of productivity suites, Microsoft Office, is the market participant to beat, and Google is lining up to do just that.

As we take stock of the present, and look into the future, will Microsoft Office retain its throne, or will more nimble, lightweight online software take its place? It’s a billion dollar question, so let’s get started.

The Present:

Office 2010 has been an engine of growth for Microsoft since it came out in the middle of last year, driving up both profits and revenues. If Office 2007 was controversial, with its ‘Ribbon’ design interface, Office 2010 has managed to shake off that stigma and become a user favorite in homes and workplaces alike.

But Office 2010, and its sister suite Office 2011 for Mac, are hardly the only productivity products that Microsoft is hard at work on, even if they are the most popular and best known.

Office Live, Microsoft’s oldest ‘cloud’ productivity solution in its current form barely resembles its past. Born in 2006, around the time of Vista, Office Live was a tool for small businesses to get online. For free, a small company could get a half gigabyte of storage, 25 email accounts, corporate instant messaging, and a domain name. Obviously, it was a hit among ever-frugal minor enterprises.

But Microsoft had different plans for Office Live. The product was stripped of its small business focus, and the Office files that users had uploaded were moved to SkyDrive. In October of 2008, at the Professional Developers Conference in LA, Microsoft announced that Office Web Apps would be available through Office Live in the future. After a lengthy waiting period, in June of 2010, a mere eight days before the formal release of Office 2010, Office Web Apps went live.

The transition from Office Live being a small business resource into a consumer facing product that serves lightweight versions of the full offline Office suite was then complete. If you head to officelive.com now, you are greeted with a bold call to try out Office Web Apps. Office Live is now, to all intents and purposes, Cloud Office.

For reference, this is what Word in the cloud looks like:

It is a usable product, if you don’t need to do anything to complex, data intensive, or large. As with other cloud offerings, such as Google Apps (more on that later), Office Live is not a daily use suite for the professional in need of power.

Microsoft, however, has another iron in the fire. The small business aspects that once had a home in Office Live did not die off completely, but went into hibernation. In the last week, Microsoft released the hotly anticipated beta of Office 365, the spirit-child of the old Office Live, a new product that includes Exchange Server, SharePoint server, Lync server, and Office 201o. Its feature set is far richer than what was offered in the original Office Live line, but it comes with a price tag; Office 365 has no free tier, whereas the point of Office Live was its zero cost.

To quote Microsoft:

“Office 365 is the best of everything we know about productivity, all in a single cloud service. With Office 365, your local bakery can get enterprise-caliber software and services for the first time, while a multinational pharmaceutical company can reduce costs and more easily stay current with the latest innovations. People can focus on their business, while we and our partners take care of the technology.”

Office 365 also includes a hosted version of Office Web Apps, bringing the cloud into the new small business suite. But for many companies, that might be somewhat troublesome if they are more conservative as to where employees can store and interact with data. Microsoft has a plan in place for that, allowing companies to host their own set of Office Web Apps on their internal SharePoint server. This is a middle solution, as using the internally hosted cloud apps away from the office carries technical difficulties.

To make it simple to understand, the following two slides are right out of the deck that Microsoft uses to pitch 365:

In typical form, adding complexity at every turn, Microsoft has manged to break its productivity products into three lines: the standard, local, Office suite of applications for OS X and Windows; Office Live with Office Web Apps where consumers can use their Live IDs and SkyDrive to host and edit documents and other files online; and Office 365, the small business solution that includes the best of Microsoft’s enterprise tools as at a lower price level, alongside hosted or self-hosted Office Web Apps.

If you didn’t get all of that, it’s fine, you don’t need to know each granular piece. Just understand that Microsoft is trying to reach all parts of the market with products that are tailored to fit. If in fact they can pitch the correct product to the correct channel, Microsoft’s strategy could be quite successful. If not, Microsoft might have spent untold sums on more than one albatross.

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