While this is good press for AppNexus, I have no idea why eBay would participate in this article:

For example, say a man just searched for golf clubs on eBay (which has been testing a system from a company called AppNexus for more than a year). EBay can essentially follow that person’s activities in real time, deciding when and where to show him near-personalized ads for golf clubs throughout the Web.

If eBay finds out that he bought a driver at another site, it can update the ad immediately to start showing him tees, golf balls or a package vacation to St. Andrew’s, Scotland, often called the home of golf. If a woman was shopping, eBay could change the ad’s color or presentation.

This sounds creepy, doesn’t it? Again, it doesn’t sound that bad to me given this industry is what I spend 16 hours a day thinking about (though how the heck do they know the guy bought something on another site? that appears to be a fiction)  – but I know that not everyone would feel the same way. eBay would seem to have everything to lose here. I guess it could be that they’ve already had to speak about it publicly for investors and so the cat is out of the bag, but it seems very odd.

It is interesting what you retain in email, 10 years later. In early 2000, I had a spreadsheet I’d been maintaining with the “Word of the Day”. Here are the words for Friday, March 10, 2000 and the following Monday, March 13, 2000:

3/10/2000: warp speed – the highest possible speed

3/13/2000: Efflorescence – the period or state of flowering | a : the action or process of developing and unfolding as if coming into flower : blossoming b : an instance of such development c : fullness of manifestation : culmination

It truly did feel like we were moving at warp speed during those times. And only later I think did we realize that we had reached the blossoming or culmination of the manifestation of a kind of technological innocence at the same time the Nasdaq peaking at a value it has never ever even remotely approached again. If there truly was a time of “yes we can”, this seemed to be it.

I could write all kinds of reflections, but I figured I would just share two different news stories (one with a bit of PR lead-in about “group buying”) that came across my email those days that I think say a lot about the technology (much more expensive to do these things, now they might be 5-person $100k projects vs. $35mm VC investments), the mindset and importantly, the media coverage of the time. Also, crucially, a lot of these things were actually pretty cool, just 7-10 years too early perhaps…

> —–Original Message—–

> From: xxxxxxx, xxxxxxx [mailto:xxxxxx@accompany.com]

> Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 6:48 PM

> To: ‘xxxxx@jup.com’

> Subject: Sold! Accompany First Online Group Buy of Cars

>

>

> Hi xxxxxx,

>

> First and foremost, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts with

> the Seattle P-I reporter who covered Mercata’s additional funding

> announcement on Tuesday. I felt as though you shared both the

> benefits and downfalls of group buying very clearly. Despite the fact

> that we are a competitor of Mercata I’m sure everyone in this space

> agrees that it’s most important for the public to have a clear

> understanding of what our companies do.

>

> Secondly, I wanted to be sure that you had the latest news about

> Accompany’s success in group buying. Accompany launched a promotional

> Buy-Cycle around cars just a little over a week ago, and we sold out

> of all of them in under a week! This was the first time cars were

> sold in the US in an online group buying environment and it was an

> amazing success. This proves that Accompany’s group buying model can

> work for big ticket items along with our everyday technology and

> sports and fitness lines across our network. We are going to continue

> spicing up the product categories with promotional Buy-Cycles in the

> coming months.

> We’ll be in touch soon to schedule an all-encompassing briefing.

> Please be in touch if you need any more information or want to give me

> feedback about our news.

>

> > Best to you!

> > xxxxxx

> >

> >

> > ACCOMPANY SUCCESSFULLY CLOSES WORLD’S FIRST GROUP BUY-CYCLESM FOR

> > CARS Toyota Camry Group Buy a Hit with Consumers and Dealers Alike–

> > Customers Team Together to Drive Down Price within First Week of

> > Promotion

> >

> >

> > SAN FRANCISCO, CA – MARCH 9, 2000 – Accompany, Inc.,

> > (<http://www.accompany.com>) the pioneer in group buying -

> on the Web,

> > announced today that it has successfully sold out its promotional

> > offering of Toyota Camry 2000 LEs. With its network of over

> 20 partner

> > sites, Accompany tested the waters of the automotive space last week

> > by offering a special promotion for ten new Camrys, in conjunction

> > with Torrance Toyota in Torrance, CA and Piercey Toyota in San Jose,

> > CA. By empowering customers to work together to achieve value

> > through volume, Accompany proved a natural fit between the group

> > buying model and online automobile sales.

> >

> > Every buyer in the Toyota Camry Buy-Cycle was able to

> purchase the car

> > at approximately $500 below listed dealer cost, because of

> Accompany’s

> > unique group buying value proposition. In addition to the

> ten buyers,

> > hundreds of interested car shoppers across the US contacted

> Accompany

> > in response to this offering, attracted by both the prospect of

> > unmatchable savings and the freedom from haggling over the purchase

> > price at a dealership.

> >

> > Accompany’s Toyota purchasers have responded

> enthusiastically to their

> > savings, as well as the ease of their online buying

> experience. “Group

> > Buying for cars was a natural fit,” noted Accompany customer Diane

> > DeMartini. “No hassle, no haggle, and great upfront pricing that I

> > could never have gotten on my own. Thanks to Accompany, now I have

> > a new Toyota Camry!”

> >

> > Accompany launched this promotional Buy-Cycle to gauge customer

> > interest in participating in group buying for cars. With its

> > overwhelming response, the Buy-Cycle, slated to stay open for two

> > weeks, closed out in under a week.

> >

> > “We are just blown away by the success of the promotional

> Buy-Cycle we

> > launched for Toyota Camrys,” said Jim Rose, CEO and co-founder of

> > Accompany. “We now have the learning to look seriously

> into expanding

> > our product base to include higher ticket items like automobiles,

> > where customers stand to derive the greatest value from buying

> > together.”

> >

> > About Accompany, Inc.

> > Founded in 1998, Accompany, Inc. created the Get It

> Together Network,

> > the Web’s first group buying network that aggregates demand for

> > products and services in real-time. Using its unique patent-pending

> > Demand CoordinationSM technology to empower communities and

> suppliers

> > with private-branded group buying, the Get It Together Network pools

> > buyers from across the Web into real-time Buy-Cycles, in

> which prices

> > drop as more people join. The Get It Together Network revolutionizes

> > dynamic trade by affording consumers and small businesses alike the

> > purchasing advantage traditionally reserved for large organizations

> > that buy in volume. Accompany, Inc. is headquartered in San

> Francisco,

> > with its development center in Toronto, Canada.

> >

> > #-#-#

> >

> > ACCOMPANY, GET IT TOGETHER NETWORK, DEMAND COORDINATION,

> and BUY-CYCLE

> > are service marks of Accompany Inc. Other names mentioned may be

> > trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

> >

> >

> > xxxxxxxxxxx

> > Public Relations Manager

> > xxxx xxxx xxxxx

> > xxxxxxx@accompany.com

> > http://www.accompany.com

> >

FireDrop Mounts Ambitious Effort
To Radically Alter E-Mail System

By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

FireDrop, a secretive start-up with high-profile backing, is mounting an ambitious effort to change the way people communicate online.

The Redwood City, Calif., company has developed a technology called Zaplets that combines attributes of e-mail and the Web. A user sends one Zaplet to several recipients, who can view them with most current e-mail programs. But while most electronic collaboration requires a string of e-mails, each Zaplet is automatically updated with recipients’ responses.

Office workers selecting the best time for a meeting, for example, might send out a calendar Zaplet that adds notations as each employee indicates preferred times. A brokerage firm might mail out a client’s stock portfolio each morning, but graphs would reflect later trading when the customer opened the message in the afternoon. A newspaper could send out one set of headlines in the morning and revise them completely by dinner, though only one Zaplet arrived at the user’s mailbox.

FireDrop, which is closely held, is one of several companies announcing radical business plans this week at the PC Forum conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. But Zaplets have unusually broad potential, some people familiar with the technology say, because the company plans to let users and companies customize them for any business or recreational purpose.

Each Zaplet is akin to a Web page that is generated on FireDrop’s servers each time a user activates it. For that reason, they can be slower to call up than conventional e-mail. With an estimated 150 million e-mail boxes in existence, the company acknowledges that managing a huge number of Zaplets with acceptable performance will require massive investments in computer infrastructure.

“We are building one of the largest systems on the Internet” to accommodate such traffic, said David Roberts, FireDrop’s president and co-founder.

The company is the latest project of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a Palo Alto, Calif., firm that has backed such Web stars as Netscape Communications Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. Company directors include Joe Kraus, cofounder of Excite At Home Corp.

What is a Zaplet?

• A new technology from FireDrop that combines e-mail and the Web.

Why is it different?

• Instead of getting multiple messages, a single Zaplet in a user’s mailbox is constantly updated with feedback from other recipients.

What’s it good for?

• Users and companies can design their own Zaplets to hold discussions, make decisions, plan events, take polls, manage projects, write stories, share pictures and other information.

Though Kleiner Perkins has put only $5 million into the company so far, Mr. Khosla makes clear that money isn’t likely to be a problem as FireDrop attempts to build a new communications platform.

“E-mail is obsolete and dead when you read it,” Mr. Khosla said. “This is e-mail that is current when read, not current when sent.”

Zaplets were first conceived by FireDrop co-founder Brian Axe with help from Mr. Roberts, a 10-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who has gone to unusual lengths to keep the company’s plans secret. To throw snoops off the track, one test Web site associated the technology with a fictitious company called Zaplet Inc. FireDrop required employees and partners to sign nondisclosure agreements with liabilities of $100,000 for leaks.

The company is releasing a test version of the service Monday, offering a dozen ready-made templates to allow people to start using Zaplets, including forms for scheduling activities, taking polls, holding discussions, sharing pictures and writing interactive stories. FireDrop plans to let consumers use the service free, but charge companies for building large-scale applications for internal collaboration or customer services.

Another company coming out at PC Forum with a star-studded investor list is Propel Software Corp. (www.propel.com), a venture by Infoseek Corp. founder Steve Kirsch that is offering technology and services to help companies set up good Web sites faster. It has raised $6 million from backers that include Andrew Grove, chairman of Intel Corp., Netscape Communications Corp. co-founder Marc Andreessen, Dell Computer Corp.’s chief executive officer, Michael Dell, eBay Inc.’s chief executive, Meg Whitman, and retired Gen. Colin Powell.

Also at PC Forum, OnePage.com Inc. (www.onepage.com) is announcing a technology to allow people to pull pieces of content from other Web sites and place them in individualized pages. A user, for example, might open up a browser each day to a page that includes headlines from a local newspaper’s site, the latest quotes of favorite stocks, the local weather and a homework schedule from an elementary school.

The company, also based in Redwood City, was inspired by the fact that most users only visit nine or fewer Web sites a month, despite the millions now available.

OnePage.com’s investors include N.J. Nicholas Jr., former co-chief executive officer of Time Warner Inc., James Dimon, former chief executive officer of Citigroup Inc. and Strauss Zelnick, chief executive officer of Bertelsmann AG’s BMG Entertainment unit.

– Kara Swisher contributed to this article.

My post on InternetEvolution.com about Fractional Expertise and on-demand expert networks.

I was digging in the old archives from when I was an analyst at Jupiter (1999 to 2003). Amazing stuff. Think back. It was August 17, 1999, the Jupiter Online Advertising Forum, and the keynote was Kevin O’Connor of Doubleclick. Thinking about the privacy debate, I thought his comments back then over 10 years ago were quite interesting. Here is the verbatim from part of the Q and A session:

The important thing about privacy policy is that you actually state what you do and you don’t do different things, because when you do that, it’s fraud. And that’s really, if you look at all the privacy cases that come up, it’s usually based on fraud. People say that I’m not going to take your data and sell it and they turn around and they sell it. That’s fraud. If you tell a consumer, look, we are going to take your data and sell it, maybe you’re a free ISP or something, that’s how you make money, that’s fine. Congress doesn’t have a problem with that.

The other one is, you know, really disclosure and that’s back to the privacy policy. But it’s giving people the choice, the chance to opt out. You know, we put a system in place two and a half years ago where people could opt out of the cookie at any time. And it’s a single click. It’s very, very easy. Most places, I don’t think anyone else has an opt-out system. It’s really, really bad. You’ve got to give consumers choice.

Now, people are afraid of giving consumers choice because they think that consumers, oh, geez, if they have a chance to opt out they’re all going to opt out. We have, we reach about 100 million consumers a month and about 10 a day opt out. The reality is that in many cases, privacy is more of a press issue – there’s probably press in here today and I’m going to regret this — and there are definitely some consumers that care, but the consumers that care want to have a choice. And once you give them that choice, it really takes the issue off the table.

I tried to access Twitter on the Freefi/Jiwire network here at the Oakland Airport, and kept getting weird page refreshes from the bar at the top of the screen that loads banner ads, a small and a 728×90. The thing that sucks though is that at least half the large ads and all the small ads seem to be PSAs or house ads. This is a common issue with high-frequency websites, but then again, this is not an unplanned-for situation with a service like this. Also the PSAs are interspersed with paying ads which leads me to believe that their ad network rotation is horribly misconfigured at best.

Worse – a lot of sites just won’t load – like the twitter problems above – and amazon.com is inaccessible probably because of javascript conflicts with the shitty browser bar. The pop up window for inserting images into wordpress is also broken by it.

I’ve written about this before about this service here. I would much rather pay than deal with this crap, especially for public service ads that are making nobody any money. I wonder how last this company will last with this kind of revenue model. It looks like Collective Media is providing some of the underlying advertising.

I checked out Freefi’s twitter page which hasn’t been updated since November 2009. They are apparently located in “Wooldland Hills, CA” [sic]. I’m going to tweet this post to Freefi.com and their 12 followers, and encourage them to respond , once I can get onto twitter from my blackberry of course.

Just a funny observation when reading this good Newsweek article about privacy, is that there are a lot of behavioral targeting pixels getting fired on that self-same page, including AudienceScience, Quantcast, and Doubleclick. Such is the world we live in:

http://pix04.revsci.net/B09806/b3/0/3/0902121/642641728.js?D=DM_LOC%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.newsweek.com
http://pix04.revsci.net/B09806/b3/0/3/0902121/997357272.js?D=DM_LOC%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.newsweek.com
http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel;r=1520162946;fpan=0;fpa=P0-2043871114-1266555449664;ns=0;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fid%2F233773;ref=;ce=1;je=1;sr=1440x900x32;dg=P9940-W-MS-7;dst=1;et=1266555480477;tzo=480;a=p-1axiNKelAV3F-;labels=Business_Tech
http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel;r=1991808241;fpan=1;fpa=P0-2043871114-1266555449664;ns=0;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fid%2F233773;ref=;ce=1;je=1;sr=1440x900x32;dg=P9940-W-MS-7;dst=1;et=1266555449664;tzo=480;a=p-1axiNKelAV3F-;labels=Business_Tech
http://core.insightexpressai.com/adServer/adServerESI.aspx?bannerID=155498&siteID=N2958.Newsweek&creativeID=35286945
http://core.insightexpressai.com/adServer/adServerESI.aspx?bannerID=157152
http://core.insightexpressai.com/adServer/GetInvite2.aspx?esi=true&bannerID=157152&referer=www.newsweek.com
http://core.insightexpressai.com/adserver/showInvite.aspx?ImageOnly=true&bannerID=157152&esi=true
http://ads.revsci.net/adserver/ako?activate&csid=B09806&ko=2010_2_18__0
http://ads.revsci.net/adserver/ako?activate&csid=B09806&ko=2010_2_18__1
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/b?c1=2&c2=6972086&rn=0.11742583378751214&c7=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fid%2F233773&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c10=&c15=&c16=&c8=Lyons%3A%20How%20Google%20%26%20Facebook%20Violate%20Your%20Privacy%20-%20Newsweek.com&c9=&cv=1.7
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/b?c1=2&c2=6972086&rn=0.6740785767349728&c7=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fid%2F233773&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c10=&c15=&c16=&c8=Lyons%3A%20How%20Google%20%26%20Facebook%20Violate%20Your%20Privacy%20-%20Newsweek.com&c9=&cv=1.7
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=8&c2=6035585&c3=91900631&c4=autotag&c6=00000126655545776310180000106049048050
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=8&c2=6035585&c3=91900631&c4=autotag&c6=00000126655548607223311000000106054051
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=8&c2=6035585&c3=92068662&c4=autotag&c6=00000126655545933629473000000106050057
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=8&c2=6035585&c3=92068662&c4=autotag&c6=00000126655548713221232000000106053050
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p2?c1=8&c2=6035585&c3=91900631&c4=autotag&c6=00000126655545776310180000106049048050
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=2163259;met=1;v=1;pid=45108152;aid=221548926;ko=0;cid=35286945;rid=35304763;rv=1;&timestamp=1266555475555;eid1=2;ecn1=0;etm1=2;eid2=12;ecn2=1;etm2=0;eid3=254307;ecn3=1;etm3=0;eid4=11;ecn4=1;etm4=0;eid5=254300;ecn5=1;etm5=0;

I’ve been seeing voicefive.com loading everywhere so wanted to see who this is — according to domaintools.com their nameservers are all .comscore.com – so it looks like this is another “unbranded” comscore domain. According to the voicefive.com website:

VoiceFive Networks is a leading global market research company that studies and reports on Internet trends and behavior. VoiceFive Networks is routinely commissioned to conduct research on numerous topics of concern to industry leaders in diverse fields, including travel, pharmaceuticals, and publishing.

The usual giveaways are their privacy policy address, and of course the nameservers. Then of course, the repetition of wording – if you do a google search you’ll see “a leading global market research company that studies and reports on Internet trends and behavior” also includes “Full Circle Studies” (http://www.fullcirclestudies.com) and their “ScorecardResearch … domain used by Full Circle Studies, Inc. to help with the collection of Internet web browsing data on specific websites that have enrolled in a broad market research effort to create reports on Internet behavior and trends.” We’ve seen b.scorecardresearch.com before which is the beaconing URL that comscore is using for reconciling its panel numbers with the higher site-measured figures.

My younger brother Ray has a very cool job – driving and writing about cars! Getting flown to car launches all over the place and getting paid to try out lots of different cars like Nissan GT-Rs, BMW Z4′s and all the rest… I must say it’s not half bad.

Lots of discussion around the comScore $10k fee for measurement, most notably initiated by Jason Calacanis. I happened to stumble across some interesting data along these lines. It appears that the URL used by the beaconing program is b.scorecardresearch.com (the domain is owned by TMRG, Inc., “an organization dedicated to managing a leading market research community comprised of millions of Internet and mobile consumers from around the globe. The data generated from this community is used to help companies understand trends and patterns online and on the mobile Internet.” TMRG is a service of comScore, so they say.

A few things about this all seemed strange for comScore to say for example that they needed people to subsidize creating this data/storing it; that you needed to pay more for better data and so on. Also that you needed to pay to help them “audit the data” to make sure tags were not incorrectly placed on multiple sites. That’s BS too — any system will be smart enough to make sure it’s only counting pages with the correct URL basis/referrer. But anyway, I digress. The data is worth looking at.

This appears to be the format similar to this <img src=”http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6662697&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c15=&cj=1″ />. Anyway, I just aggregated some of the data around various IDs we saw randomly while looking at other data. Here they are for you to do with as you will, in a scribd format.

Scorecard Research – comscore

I saw an AdMob ad for an “X-Ray Scan” in the Viigo application, which reminded me of the x-ray glasses you would see advertised in comic books along with Sea Monkeys and what-not (living outside of the US as a kid, I was always intrigued by these products yet they were also out of my reach – ironically exactly the point here as we’ll see), and so I “thumbwheeled” on the ad.

It was for mobile wallpaper that looks like an x-ray scan. And of course, I can get lots of other fun wallpapers and ringtones for “just 9.99/mo”. Remember to remove the $ sign, I’m sure, it’s not by accident. I clicked on the terms link. Very  sparse, almost non-existent. About – was blank except for a graphic that has the name 28282 on it and very little else. How did I know it was running via AdMob? The title of the page in my browser is “X Ray AdMob”. I have no doubt that these ads are making a whole heckuva lot of money for these guys.

I decided to find out more about 28282 and did a search for them online. I found the Club 28282 page on Class Action Connect and it was quite sad. Lots of posts from parents, kids, people thinking that by complaining on this board someone was going to help them because they were unable to stop the services and/or the SMS spam that accompanied it. One person had over $500 of charges racked up by their 11-year old. Etc. Etc. Read some of the comments. Go on.

What was crazy though, was that I first read this page on my browser, with no ads to speak of, but when I looked again online in a full browser, this is what I saw:

Unreal – Google contextually targeting ringtones and basically pouring salt into the wounds of anyone visiting here by displaying similar ads for the very services people are here to complain about. This stuff is toxic, but the carriers make a lot of money out it and it appears as if they are okay letting the cycle of bad experience – complaint – chargeback go on. I heard a story recently (perhaps apocryphal? sounds very plausible though) of someone who was a big hero back in the day at MCI Worldcom since they figured out a regulation/legal loophole to add a $1 “service fee” onto every customer’s bill. If you called in they would automatically remove it but it was a quick way for them to make millions of extra dollars.

Forget about the ads it runs, for Google, becoming a mobile phone hardware company will give them all the customer service headaches they could ever want. Couldn’t imagine being a phone carrier. Good luck.