Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Instagram Grows 850% and Tops Twitter in Mobile Users - Techvibes.com

  • Mobile video should continue to prove its worth for platforms like Instagram that won’t have to include any existing company’s video player. There won’t have to be a Vimeo, YouTube, QuickTime, or Windows Media Player for starters

  • Another technology called Clipstream, Destiny’s streaming media technology, enables a single video file to play on all devices. It comes at a 90% lower bandwidth cost and there is no need for a player.

     

    Videos will “just play” in browsers, mobile and Internet alike with no need for player plug-ins. Firefox recently came out with a mobile browser that thus far represents 1% of the marke

• Together, HTML5 and DRM can take out native apps | VentureBeat

  • • For Consumers (all of us): (a) Hope there’s an app for your mobile platform (b) If you have devices operating on different platforms, you need to purchase the app for each platform (c) Hope the app is specifically designed for your phone and tablet.
     

  • The only thing holding back HTML5 from killing native apps is DRM
  • but the ironic thing is that every video delivered through native apps is not Flash-based
  • but you know what’s missing from its current form? Video.
  • few sites outside of YouTube have worked some back-end magic to ensure you can watch what you want when you want it. Ever visit your favorite site on an iPad only to see a black box where you could swear there should be a video? It sucks.
  • • Native Apps fill the Void: Nobody supports Flash on mobile. Not Apple or Microsoft or Android … and soon not even Adobe. Flash on mobile is a dying technology. If you want to watch videos from your favorite places like Hulu, HBO, or even TMZ, then don’t go into the web browser, visit the app store and download the native app.
     

  • And therein lies the rub: if you want to watch videos on your mobile, download the app. The reason? Within native apps, the video content can be protected. Of course, if you get the app, you’re tied to your device (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.). This is where DRM comes in handy for the ecosystem

  • Yes, there are some who believe DRM in any form goes against the very idea of HTML5. This ideal forces them to make a decision: Either believe that a video-less mobile web world can win or understand that consumers want the good stuff and to get it, it needs to be protected.

     

• MasterCard Selling Your Data Just in Time for the Holidays | Wired Business | Wired.com

  • MasterCard is packaging its transaction data — your transaction data — and selling it to advertisers.
  • When a consumer swipes a credit card in a store, she says MasterCard’s data-packaging division receives information about the date, time, amount and merchant. By aggregating that data and comparing it to its deep well of historical data on spending patterns, Grossman says MasterCard can then divide up consumers into millions of audience “segments

• Amazon's Next Big Business Is Selling You | Wired Business | Wired.com

  • In a digital economy where some of the internet’s biggest companies and the country’s richest people have built their fortunes on the ability to more precisely target ads, one company sits on a trove of data it has barely started to exploit. In internet advertising-speak, visitors to Amazon.com are further down the purchasing funnel than visitors to Google or Facebook. “
  • I think Amazon is just starting to scale the use of shopper data in its advertiser offerings,”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.