Matt Hickey / Crave: The gadget blog:
Dell's rumored smartphone: Look out RIM — OK, so Dell and Apple have been locked in a marketing war for years. Dell has long been considered the default PC for enterprise, while Apple has positioned itself as the most influential consumer computer brand in the world.
Another Super Bowl, another banned PETA ad. NBC banned the latest ad, dubbed Veggie Love, from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for being too racy. 
Everybody’s attention will be focused on the gridiron this afternoon. And that raises the perennial question: are Super Bowl ads worth the high price tags? Various sources suggest that the cost for a 30 second ad is now $3 million, up 10 percent from a year ago. By comparison, a World Series ad last year cost $392,000, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
The difference is a matter of eyeballs. The Super Bowl drew a record 97 million viewers last year. Ads for the Oscars, which drew 40 million viewers last year, cost about $1.67 million. NBC is expected to rake in $200 milion from the ads for the whole game, according to TNS.
The companies running commercials this year include Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola, H&R Block, Intel/DreamWorks Animation, GoDaddy, Career Builder, Cash4Gold, and Monster.com. Past advertisers such as Federal Express, General Motors and Garmin have pulled out, citing tough economic times.
I wonder if we’re hitting one of the peaks for such traditional media advertising. The Internet is stealing dollars away from traditional media. Internet ads are at least measurable. You can tell what kind of impact they’re having because a lot of the ads have some kind of direct call to action, such as clicking on an ad or getting people to sign up for something oniline.
PETA has of course hit on the right strategy with its Veggie Love commercial. They intentionally make an overly racy ad (in this case, lingerie-clad models showing their love for vegetables), the TV network rejects it, the uproar gets everybody’s attention, and then the PETA web site scores millions of hits from people who are curious about the banned video.
Are the Super Bowl ads a waste of money? Should brands spend their money online instead? Please leave your comments.
‘Veggie Love’: PETA’s Banned Super Bowl Ad
Filed under: Transportation
Takeoka Jidosha Kogei's electric minicar gets slightly more macro, even more cute originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
We’ve known for a while that there are a lot of bad websites out there that could damage your computer or wish to stealing your personal information. But this morning, it was revealed that 100 percent of all websites wished to do you harm — or at least, according to a little search site called Google that is.
Yes, between 6:30 AM PST and 7:35 AM PST, every single listing for every single search done through Google was flagged with the warning “This site may harm your computer,” Google’s vice president of search product and user experience, Marissa Mayer explained today on the Google Blog . While this was obviously an error — and a bad one — the blame game led to some further confusion.
Initially, Google noted that the site StopBadware.org provided its badware data (a listing of sites that intend to harm visitors), and seemed to indicate that being the root of the error. In fact, StopBadware.org does not provide Google with badware data, but instead simply helps Google come up with the cirteria for maintaining its own list. Google updated its post to clarify that it was in fact Google’s own fault and StopBadware.org wrote it own post on the matter as well.
Mayer notes that users who saw the erroneously flagged search results only encountered them for about 40 minutes or so. Still, it’s worth repeating that it was every single page that Google indexes on the Internet that was flagged as spam during that time period.
If Google does another round of layoffs , I have a feeling I know where they’ll start.
[photo: flickr/freezelight]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bloomberg:
Adobe's Narayen Says Flash on IPhone Is a Challenge — Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) — Adobe Systems Inc. faces a challenge in creating a version of its Flash video software for Apple Inc.'s iPhone, Chief Executive Officer Shantanu Narayen said. — “It's a hard technical challenge …
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Aidan Malley / AppleInsider:
Adobe, Apple working together on Flash for iPhone — Once thought to be building Flash for the iPhone mostly on its own, Adobe has mentioned at the World Economic Forum that it's not only continuing work on the animation plug-in but has teamed up with Apple to make it a reality.
Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Video
Apple teams up with Adobe for iPhone Flash at long last originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsWhy Do You Need Best Registry Cleaners?
Get yourself a registry cleaner and scan your system for broken links, CLSID or DLL’s. These redundant files are just clogging up your system and slowing it down. A registry will clean up loads of error registry on your computer.
Over time your system will become slow and sluggish. You will have through the years or months depending on your Internet activity, downloaded tons of stuff from the Internet. You will need to clean the registry of your system in order to make your system run more efficiently. Registry cleaners can repair and clean your registry on the computer. A registry cleaner, such as the windows Vista registry cleaners or the Mechanic Registry cleaner can organize and streamline your computer registry by unclogging all the junk that has been downloaded onto the hard drives and are no longer of any use but are there and slowing down the system.
Regular registry cleaning and tuning is very important. Without this the system is definitely going to crash attracting a very high bill from the technician not to mention the data that could be lost in the bargain. You can take the cheaper way out by downloading one of the free registry cleaner software from the Internet but you may find adware or spyware if using free version. There are loads of windows Vista a registry cleaner softwares or just registry cleaner software that are compatible with whatever operating system you are using.
Analyze Registry cleaners Before Using It
A good registry repair software will have the following features:
A registry cleaner scan all types of problems such as invalid paths, file types, CLSID’s DLL’s Sound files, Fonts, extensions and class keys. Registry cleaners will have these features in a place where they are easy to access and well organized. The registry Cleaner will be easy to use. In addition the registry cleaner software that you download free or purchase, should have very good customer support. Many downloadable a registry cleaner software can create backups of the registry. Restoring the registry may not be as simple as cleaning up the registry with the help of the software and so it is important for the company that supplied you with the registry cleaner software to have a customer support to help you restore your registry to a working state.
Safety Is Paramount
Safety is also a prime concern while deciding which a registry cleaner to download or purchase. Some good a registry cleaner or repair software can help you get the computer back to running condition with the documentation and online tools. So, even though there are risks involved in cleaning up the registry, the rewards of having a fine tuned and cleaned registry are many.
You can download recommended Windows Registry Cleaners here.
Get expert suggestions to cheap PlayStation 3 – welcome to your individual tips store.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 |
Check out some of the latest makeuseof discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For even more app reviews subscribe to makeuseof directory. |
(1) DeferredSender - Schedule email delivery for future from your email program. That is to say, you can schedule emails even if you’re using online program like Gmail or desktop email clients like Outlook. Read more: DeferredSender - Schedule Email Delivery For Future.
(2) FreePDFCards - Easily generate printable business cards online. Just type in your contact information, upload your logo, customize text size and get PDF file that you can print out using any printer. Read more: FreePDFCards - Create Printable Business Cards Online.
(3) MergePDF - Online PDF joiner app for merging PDF’s online. Anyone can use it to combine multiple PDF documents into one. Read more: MergePDF - Online PDF Joiner
(4) PageRankChecker - Another page rank checker. You can check page rank for multiple URL’s, check page rank of an entire site using XML sitemap, check page rank of all the links from a particular URL. Read more: PageRankChecker - Comprehensive Page Rank Checking Tool.
(5) Web2.0calc - Online calculator that can perform complex arithmetic calculations and plot graphs. Read more: Web2.0cal - Web2.0 Styled Cool Online Calculator.
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last 3-4 days. If you want us to send you daily round-up of all cool websites we come across leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed.
Enjoyed the article? Please leave a comment and tell us what you think about it.
New on MakeUseOf …