The Deal - Nielsen Will Evaluate Mobile Media Usage & Users

Well, you know it had to happen sooner or later…and it has. The Nielsen Company, which has long gauged and quantified traditional media and its users, and in the last decade has done the same with the Internet, is extending its reach into mobile media.

The Nielsen Company has announced that it will begin measuring mobile phone users through a new service called Nielsen Wireless. This service will measure how many people use content services such as mobile Internet and mobile video and what impact this has on established media behavior.

Nielsen Wireless is led by Nielsen Vice President, Jeff Herrmann, who also helms Nielsen Games, Nielsen's video game measurement service. 

"The value of an entertainment medium is directly proportional to how well it is measured," said Herrmann. "Reliable and accurate measurement of mobile consumers will enable advertisers to properly evaluate the mobile marketing opportunity. This new mobile measurement service demonstrates Nielsen's continued commitment to follow content wherever consumers take it. Independent measurement of the cross-media behavior of the growing mobile audience will support and accelerate the evolution of mobile media business models."

Nielsen Wireless is designed specifically for the wireless industry and will complement Nielsen's Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2) initiative, which will measure television usage on all television and video platforms, including personal video devices such as mobile phones.  Nielsen already supports the wireless industry through customer segmentation, ringtone sales tracking (aka Nielsen RingScan), attitudinal and behavioral surveys and mobile polling.  Nielsen Wireless will work in tandem with these existing Nielsen services.

Nielsen Wireless' first product – Mobile Vector – will launch in the U.S. in July 2007.  It will use information culled from Nielsen's existing National People Meter TV sample to report on media behavior and audience demographics segmented by wireless carrier. Through continued collaboration with wireless industry stakeholders, Nielsen's ultimate goal is to develop a system that will support a market-wide view of mobile media consumption

"Understanding the consumer value proposition of mobile marketing can only come from understanding user behavior," said Courtney Jane Acuff, director of denuo, a Publicis Group Company. "The announcement of Nielsen's Mobile Vector now gives brands and agencies insights that were previously unavailable. Education is so critical to the overall success of this new medium and having trusted syndicated research resources to better educate and ultimately inform the planning of new media initiatives is crucial to success and longevity."

The Nielsen Wireless initiative is long overdue, and will most certainly affect the fees to be generated by the nascent and growing mobile ad sector.

The Flop – nuTsie Downloads your iTunes to Cell Phones…

There's no shortage of mobile-based apps and widgets crowding the wireless market these days. Some are quite useful, others work poorly, and many don't fit into the prevailing mobile environments used by the majority of cell phone manufacturers. But if you're an iTune-aholic, then nuTsie may be for you.

Seattle, WA-based Melodeo today announced nuTsie, a new mobile music service that allows you to have your entire iTunes library on your mobile phone.

nuTsie lets users access their iTunes music on a wide variety of popular phones. nuTsie is built on Melodeo's mobile streaming technology, which simply means users don't have to sync their phone to a computer, download music or deal with limited storage capacity on their phone. The nuTsie client, now in public beta, lets anyone shuffle through their iTunes music and playlists, in hi-fi quality, on their mobile phone or on the Web.

"nuTsie is part of the next generation of music services that will make listening to the stuff you like fun and easy while also taking care of the artists, labels and music publishers," said Dave Dederer, VP of Music Content at Melodeo and a founding member of the The Presidents of the United States of America. "First and foremost, I'm a music lover, and nuTsie lets me take my music anywhere. But I'm also a songwriter, recording artist and record label owner, and nuTsie represents the first mobile music service where everybody wins."

The following are nuTsie's chief features:

• You can use your current phone
• You can share your music and playlists with friends
• nuTsie works with iTunes, the most popular digital music service in history
• You avoid the hassle of downloading or side-loading music
• Your computer does not have to be running to use nuTsie

Very cool stuff, especially if you're one of those who suffer from Mac Smack, and live on your cell phone. You know who you are…

The Turn – Feedburner Among 65 Developers to Launch New Apps on Facebook

Things are moving very quickly for Chicago-based Feedburner since Google recently bought the company. They are among 65 software developers including some big-time mobile companies and content developers who have combined to place some 85 apps on social networking behemoth, Facebook.

FeedBurner has introduced Headline Animator, an application that displays the latest headlines from Feedburner users' blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds for Facebook users worldwide. Facebook is the sixth-most trafficked website in the United States.

Headline Animator is a dynamically generated graphic widget that displays the five most recent items in a blog, podcast or RSS feed. The graphic can be customized to reflect the publisher's brand and creative presentation and it can be placed in a myriad of locations including the bottom of an email, at online bulletin boards or blog headers. In essence, you can make your blog look anyway you wish.

"FeedBurner's customizable Headline Animator provides a simple way for our 422,000 online publishers to promote fresh content in a wrapper that reflects their unique personality, " said Don Loeb, FeedBurner's Vice President of Partner Services. "Now, Facebook users can easily share the latest headlines from their FeedBurner-powered blog, podcast or RSS feed on their Facebook profile page."

Among the companies and software developers who are also partners with Facebook including such heavyweights as Amazon.com, Forbes.com, Microsoft Corp., Virgin Mobile USA, Warner Bros. Records, the fashion agency Ford Models,  WashingtonPost.com, Newsweek Interactive, Red Bull Energy Drink, and some surprising participants as Obama for America, Photobucket, Inc., Hot or Not, Glimpse.com and Blue Nile.

The River – Digital Music Sites Now More Unsafe To Use Than Porn…

Remember the nasty post-Napster days of using LimeWire, BearShare, Gnutella, and Kazaa, among scads of other file-sharing and music download sites? The hue and cry was raised by the millions of users who, while trying to find and download their favorite music, typically got more than they bargained for with the ad software and malware that piggybacked on the actual program needed for sharing music or other content files.

Well, they haven't gone away even though nearly all of the file-sharing sites have been shut down or seriously crippled by draconian legal measures instituted against them by major record companies and publishing houses, especially under the aegis of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). It seems that legal digital music sites have succumbed to search issues that pose a security threat to your computer.

Security technology firm McAfee today published an update its State of Search Engine Safety report. McAfee estimates that United States web surveyors make approximately 276 million monthly searches that lead to Web sites that could compromise their online safety. Surprisingly, digital music sites are twice as likely as adult sites to pose security risks to your computer.

McAfee studied the five major United States search engines — Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask — which account for 93 percent of all search engine use. McAfee analyzed the first 50 search results returned by each search engine for 2,300 popular keywords. The keywords were selected from lists like Google Zeitgeist and Yahoo! Buzz, among other industry sources.

Among the study's key findings:

• 4.0 percent of all search results link to risky Web sites — AOL returns the safest results with 2.9 percent rated red or yellow, down from 5.3 percent in May 2006. Yahoo returned the most red or yellow results, 5.4 percent.
• Sponsored results contain 2.4 times as many risky sites as organic sites; in fact, 6.9 percent of all sponsored results are rated red or yellow.
• Categories related to music and technology continue to be among the most dangerous search terms. "Digital music" returns the highest percentage of risky sites at 19.1 percent, followed by "tech toys" and popular keywords like "chat" and "wallpaper."
• File sharing programs were also prominent among top risky keywords. Dangerous file sharing searches include "Bearshare" (45.9 percent risky results), "limewire" (37.1 percent), "kazaa" (34.9 percent) and "winmix" (32 percent).
• Scam sites remain prevalent, representing 3.2 percent of all sponsored listings. Typical scams include download sites selling free software, ringtone sites with misleading billing practices, and work-at-home sites with deceptive terms.
• Among adult keyword search results, risky sites increased by 17.5 percent since December 2006, and risky sites now number 9.4 percent of overall adult search results.

Ain't that a kick in the head? It makes me wish that the in-receivership woes of Tower Records, and the financial issues facing other brick and mortar retail CD outlets were not proliferating.  If people can expect to get malware-generated computer problems downloaded along with their digital music purchase, record stores might not be disappearing like the dinosaurs everyone thought they were becoming. Might still be some use for them, after all.

Well, that's the lay of the cards for Wednesday, June 6^th. We'll be back tomorrow with another show. Until then, have a great tech day!