MeBeam

The Advertising Paradox

It's fair to say that advertising is the cornerstone of the world wide web, and is an essential part of many online sites and services;

After all, a site requires servers, staff, maintenance and time, all of which require money.

It's also fair to say, advertising is ugly, annoying and we're all experts at ignoring it.

Online advertising, essentially consists of three things.

First, a person or company who has a product, service or web site they want to start promoting to the public - this person is known as the advertiser.

Second, a person or company who has a web site, who wants to sell advertisers a place to put their ads - this person is known as the publisher.

Third, a person or company who receives ads from advertisers, and takes care of finding the best possible publishers for the ad - this person is known as the broker.

The advertiser tells the broker, how much he is willing to spend to have his ad shown.

If the advertiser, requests his advert be shown on a publishers site who is very popular, e.g on the front page of the New York Times, then of course a very large number of well-educated people are going to know about his product.

Conversely, if the advertiser, only has a small budget, the broker might only be able to find advertising space on unpopular or questionable publisher sites.

Okay, so basically:

Advertiser ===> Broker ===> Publisher

The broker takes the advertisers money, finds a suitable publishers site, the ad is shown, the broker pays a percentage of the advertisers money to the publisher.

Everyone wins !
Wait..

No - The broker wins big time - The advertiser may win, depending on how many people saw or clicked on the ad - The publisher LOSES..

Why?

Alice wants to advertise her online apple pie shop, so she finds an advertising broker ( e.g Google, Yahoo , Adbrite etc ), and is willing to pay 5 cents each time her ad is clicked.

The broker keeps a list of all the publishers it manages, and how much they are selling advertising space on their sites. The broker goes through its list of publishers and finds one, which it feels is relevant to the audience Alice wishes to reach - Possibly a cooking or catering site.

The big problem is the advertiser is charged 5 cents for each ad put on the publishers site, but the publisher generally only receives 1 cent or even less - the broker keeps a huge 80% of more of the transaction.

The big bad broker - how dare he !!?...

Well, the brokers job is difficult - but it ain't that difficult - the whole thing is automated by computers.

Still we need brokers, because, unless your a Google, and have made the massive effort in establishing relationships with publishers,its next to impossible to do it all on your own.

This why, when you buy or sell advertising on Google, you are never told how much each ad was bought/sold for - Basically, if your a publisher, just shut up, don't ask questions, and you will receive a cheque in the mail each month from Google. How much of the pie was actually given to you, is none of your business, so don't ask !

So, is this why I am bitching about online advertising ?- NO.

Let's take TokBox for example, who would be considered a competitor to MeBeam-

If I phoned them up, and asked them, to redirect they're users to MeBeam in exchange for some money - how much would they charge me ?

I'm pretty certain it would be fairly hefty - $1, $10 , $100 per user -after all , I am asking them to send their customers to me.

However, if Tokbox became a publisher and started selling advertising space on their site, then Google would select relevant ads to video chat.

Essentially, Tokbox, would be displaying video chat/video conferencing class ads, and making nothing more than a few cents when they receive their Google cheque at the end of the month.

For a microscopic amount of revenue , they would have to had direct their customers right into the hands of the competition.

It's worth noting, that Google don't pay publishers to display ads, indeed they only pay publishers for ads which are clicked - so its a certainty - you have just handed over a customer to a competitor, and made peanuts in return..

IconDial, so can you

IconDial is a new service which has been launched, which allows you to make telephone calls to any land line or mobile phone in any country.


Like MeBeam, IconDial does not ask you to download anything or ask you to sign up.

As you can imagine, this could very well be a very popular service, not to
mention expensive for me.

Sounds great, but so far this business model doesn't sound too healthy.
I think I may have a solution, which could work.

In return for this service, you listen to a short advertisement before the call, long enough to stick, but short enough not to be annoying.
I'm thinking 3-5 seconds.

Advertising space will be available to purchase, simply by uploading your short jingle in mp3 format, and a token fee of around 5cents per ad.

IconDial is still in pre-beta, so it might have some bumps, but all in all, it's
ready to use.

Check it out at, www.icondial.com

The World's Fastest

Many moons ago, myself and a small community of early adopters, set out to design and build , literally

"The world's fastest video phone"

At the time, this was a powerful mantra, because video phones back in those days, suffered from jerky, photo like video and terrible audio to video synchronization.

The project, called WigiWigi, was, without a doubt, a labor of love.

It was not uncommon for me to release dozens of versions of the project every night, with each one ever so slowly inching towards faster and faster frame rates, until it was common knowledge, that WigiWigi, was without a doubt the world's fastest video phone.

The late Russel Shaw of ZDnet, covered my work, by writing an article about our first commercial release called Vwho.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=1040

The challenges were massive, everything was developed by hand, in both C and assembler. Audio compression, Video compression, network protocols, P2P layers etc, were all written completely from scratch, and optimized to the point, where, even today, the WigiWigi engine, still beats the pants off, virtually all of todays video phones.

The WigiWigi project, was a very satisfying chapter in my and the amazing crew of testers and community.


Today, "The World's Fastest...", is still at the core of everything I do.


Recently, this goal was immortalized, by a group of kids, who are known as sport stackers, who use MeBeam, to show off their skills to each other, and trying to break speed records in this unusual, yet, very cool, past time.

SportStacking, is the art of stacking and unstacking, plastic cups, into different formations at a blindingly fast pace.

Steven Purugganan, who is currently the world record holder for this, along with his friends, use Mebeam, to display their skills and try to smash record times.

MeBeam, is used, because, it allows people to communicate using video, at real-time speeds, without jerky, grainy movement.

Check out the following recordings of MeBeam sessions, to get an idea of how fast MeBeam and these guys are.

I shall call him MiniMe

Meet MeBeams little bro, MiniMe - a portable version of MeBeam that you can use on top of your blog , web page, or forum.

Please keep in mind, this is a pre-alpha release and may not work all the time.

MiniMe can handle 4 people in your room, but will generate an unlimited number of sub-rooms automatically.

To add MiniMe to your site, copy and paste the code at the end of this post, and remember to name your room.

<object width='323' height='460' id='zuhzy' align='middle'>
<param name='allowScriptAccess' value='always' >
<param name='movie' value='http://www.mebeam.com/minime.swf'>
<param name='quality' value='best' >
<param name='scale' value='noscale' >
<param name='salign' value='t' >
<param name='flashvars' value='room=blogroom'>
<embed flashvars='room=blogroom' src='http://www.mebeam.com/minime.swf' quality='best' scale='noscale' salign='t' width='323' height='460' name='zuhzy' align='middle' allowScriptAccess='always' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' pluginspage='http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer' >
</object>

Who you gonna call ?

In my previous post I spoke about the launch of our new operator service which effectively gives any jabber based instant messenger the ability to make a multi person video call to anyone on any other Jabber client.

Although, this is a huge step forward, we still have a long way to go, before video conferencing between any internet device is seamless and easy to use.

The next piece of this never ending jigsaw, is the ability to make multi person video calls using Skype and also be able to make and receive multi person video calls to Jabber clients.

As of June 1 ( god willing ) , a new service will be released, which will allow you to do just that.

There is still a few days to go, but you can as of today, add the contact name Mebeam, as shown below, to your Skype, and be part of the multi person video service for Skype as soon as we're ready to roll.



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