Archive for February, 2010

It’s a shame that I couldn’t find time to visit Barcelona and the MWC last week (I love Barcelona), but luckily our friend Ángel Fernández over at La Vanguardia sent us some very interesting pictures which kinda makes up for it.

La Vanguardia was showcasing some of the latest things together with us, Brightcove and Adobe, and it really is cool. The quality of the images might not live up to the things demoed, but what you see is actually interactive in-stream ads (by Videoplaza), served into a Flash based videoplayer (by Brightcove), running on a normal smartphone (by Google) in the latest version of Flash Player (10.1, by Adobe) that soon is supposed to support most of the smartphones out there.

Now, Adobe’s move with Flash Player on smartphones have generated a lot of buzz and obviously is interesting to follow as the charismatic leader of a leading provider (Apple) recently outed his feelings about Flash at least semi-public.

Whether to do mobile in-stream ads with native apps, Flash or HTML5 is going to be an interesting question for the year to come. We’re already doing two (apps and Flash), have good plans for HTML5 and reality probably is that most of us in this world have to do all three in order to support all devices out there.

But it sure was cool to try this with Flash 10.1 as it required no modifications at all of our regular Flash component to get it up and running. Further, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the entire advertising eco system is kind of leaning towards Flash (big understatement) which makes it hard to push other platforms when you’re selling ads, whether you like it or not.

Ps: Ángel is apologizing for the image quality, claiming that he’s the second worst photographer in the world, but we know that he’s inaccurate as at least two of our team members (#1, #2) have an even worse track record. :)

We are happy to announce that Göteborgs-Posten just launched their Videoplaza powered web TV platform. We now serve ads for all the leading morning papers in the three largest cities in Sweden; Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo!

With GP up and running, they are together with Dagens Nyheter and Sydsvenskan offering a larger national online video package, Citypaketet. The three have a history of offering this kind of solutions to their clients for their current online ad products reaching 1.8M Unique visitors every week. Being able to offer this kind of reach will be even more critical for online video.

“We went from contract signing to launch in four weeks, including Christmas and new years! I’m excited to be launching this project with Videoplaza and adding a new powerful offer to our advertisers”, says Mikael Nordström, Business Develop Manager at Göteborgs-Posten.

One of the reasons Citypaketet hasn’t been offering video before is the fact that the three companies all use different players. Moving over to us they can continue to use different players but still achieve consistent ad formats, measurement and forecasting, all enabled through our plugin architecture.

“I’m glad that we finally can add video to our offering as it completes the print and online offerings very well adding richer experience with sound and moving images. We’re excited to adapt the the proven success formula from the other Citypaketet offerings to the online video market.” says Dan Morén, CEO at Citypaketet.

Another interesting aspect of this is the opportunity video gives Citypaketet to get a piece of the TV pie, something I know they are quite keen on.

For questions on citypaketet contact Dan Morén, CEO at Citypaketet. dan.moren[at]citypaketet.se.