Μια ημέρα μετά τις διαμαρτυρίες και την παγκόσμια απεργία κατά των νομοσχεδίων SOPA και PIPA στην Αμερική, άγριος πόλεμος ξέσπασε στο διαδίκτυο ανάμεσα στις αρχές και στους χάκερς Anonymous.

Έτσι το FBI έκλεισε τα ξημερώματα Παρασκευής το γνωστό site streaming ταινιών και σειρών megaupload, το οποίο κατά καιρούς έχει δεχθεί την υποστήριξη καλλιτεχνών. Το megaupload.com είχε καθημερινά 50 εκ. επισκέπτες, ενώ ήταν το 72ο site σε επισκεψιμότητα στον κόσμο.

Οι Anonymous οι οποίοι είχαν προειδοποιήσει για αντίποινα, απάντησαν στις συλλήψεις που πραγματοποιήθηκαν και στο κλείσιμο του site, με μια άνευ προηγουμένου μαζική επίθεση σε μεγάλες ιστοσελίδες της Αμερικανικής κυβέρνησης (μεταξύ των οποίων και του ίδιου του FBI), καθώς και δισκογραφικών εταιρειών που υποστηρίζουν την ψήφιση των επίμαχων νομοσχεδίων που στοχεύουν στον έλεγχο του internet. 

Συγκεκριμένα, με την επιχείρηση operation megaupload, οι Anonymous 'έριξαν' δημιούργησαν προβλήματα στα ακόλουθα sites :

Department of Justice (Justice.gov)

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA.org)

Universal Music (UniversalMusic.com)

Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation (Anti-piracy.be/nl/)

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA.org)

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI.gov)

HADOPI law site (HADOPI.fr)

U.S. Copyright Office (Copyright.gov)

Universal Music France (UniversalMusic.fr)

Senator Christopher Dodd (ChrisDodd.com)

Vivendi France (Vivendi.fr)

The White House (Whitehouse.gov)

BMI (BMI.com)

Warner Music Group (WMG.com)

 

Παράλληλα όλο το βράδυ μέσω Twitter ενημέρωναν για τις επιθέσεις τους και τις κινήσεις τους, ενώ ανέβασαν και ένα βίντεο ανακοινώνοντας ότι ''δεν πρέπει να τα βάζει κανείς μαζί τους'':

Το hashtag #opmegaupload έγινε αμέσως θέμα σε όλον τον κόσμο μέσω του Twitter.

Εικάζεται ότι συνολικά 5,365 άνθρωποι πήραν μέρος στις μαζικές επιθέσεις που χαρακτηρίζονται σήμερα από τα διεθνή μέσα ως ο πρώτος πόλεμος του διαδικτύου!

Σύμφωνα με τους Anonymous το «κλείσιμο» του megaupload.com αποδεικνύει τελικά ότι η ομοσπονδιακή κυβέρνηση δεν έχει ανάγκη από νομοσχέδια για να παρεμβαίνει στο internet...

Η συνέχεια αναμένεται φυσικά με πολύ ενδιαφέρον.

 

Διαβάστε επίσης:

Μαζική επίθεση από τους Anonymous – Έριξαν και τη σελίδα του FBI

Αν θέλετε να μαθαίνετε παράλληλα όσα σημαντικά διαδραματίζονται στα ελληνικά και ξένα media κάντε like στην σελίδα του mediagate.gr στο Facebook πατώντας εδώ.

So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011.

Email

• 3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide.
• 27.6% – Microsoft Outlook was the most popular email client.
• 19% – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.
• 112 – Number of emails sent and received per day by the average corporate user.
• 71% – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).
• 360 million – Total number of Hotmail users (largest email service in the world).
• $44.25 – The estimated return on $1 invested in email marketing in 2011.
• 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.
• 0.39% – Percentage of email that was malicious (November 2011).

Websites

• 555 million – Number of websites (December 2011).
• 300 million – Added websites in 2011.

Web servers

• 239.1% – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2011.
• 68.7% – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2011.
• 34.4% – Growth in the number of NGINX websites in 2011.
• 80.9% – Growth in the number of Google websites in 2011.

Domain names

• 95.5 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2011.
• 13.8 million – Number of .net domain names at the end of 2011.
• 9.3 million – Number of .org domains names at the end of 2011.
• 7.6 million – Number of .info domain names at the end of 2011.
• 2.1 million – Number of .biz domain names at the end of 2011.
• 220 million – Number of registered domain names (Q3, 2011).
• 86.9 million – Number of country code top-level domains (.CN, .UK, .DE, etc.) (Q3, 2011).
• 324 – Number of top-level domains.
• 28% – Market share for BIND, the number one DNS server type.
• $2.6 million – The price for social.com, the most expensive domain name sold in 2011.

Internet users

• 2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide.
• 922.2 million – Internet users in Asia.
• 476.2 million – Internet users in Europe.
• 271.1 million – Internet users in North America.
• 215.9 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 118.6 million – Internet users in Africa.
• 68.6 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
• 45% – Share of Internet users under the age of 25.
• 485 million – Number of Internet users in China, more than any other country in the world.
• 36.3% – Internet penetration in China.
• 591 million – Number of fixed (wired) broadband subscriptions worldwide.

Social media

• 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011.
• 200 million – Number of users added to Facebook during 2011.
• 350 million – Number of Facebook users that log in to the service using their mobile phone.
• 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts.
• 100 million – Number of active Twitter users in 2011.
• 18.1 million – People following Lady Gaga. Twitter’s most popular user.
• 250 million – Number of tweets per day (October 2011).
• 1 – #egypt was the number one hashtag on Twitter.
• 8,868 – Number of tweets per second in August for the MTV Video Music Awards.
• $50,000 – The amount raised for charity by the most retweeted tweet of 2011.
• 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011.
• 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
• 1 billion – The number of messages sent with WhatsApp during one day (October 2011).
• 2.6 billion – Worldwide IM accounts.
• 2.4 billion – Social networking accounts worldwide.

Web browsers

Mobile

• 1.2 billion – The number of active mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide in 2011.
• 5.9 billion – The estimated number of mobile subscriptions worldwide in 2011.
• 85% – Percentage of handsets shipped globally in 2011 that included a web browser.
• 88% – Apple iPad’s share of global tablet web traffic in December.

Videos

• 1 trillion – The number of video playbacks on YouTube.
• 140 – The number of YouTube video playbacks per person on Earth.
• 48 hours – The amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• 1 – The most viewed video on YouTube during 2011 was Rebecka Black’s “Friday.”
• 82.5% – Percentage of the U.S. Internet audience that viewed video online.
• 76.4% – YouTube’s share of the U.S. video website market (December 2011).
• 4,189,214 – Number of new users on Vimeo.
• 201.4 billion – Number of videos viewed online per month (October 2011).
• 88.3 billion – Videos viewed per month on Google sites, incl. YouTube (October 2011).
  
• 43% – Share of all worldwide video views delivered by Google sites, incl. YouTube.
  

Images

• 14 million – Number of Instagram accounts created during 2011.
• 60 – The average number of photos uploaded per second to Instagram.
• 100 billion – Estimated number of photos on Facebook by mid-2011.
• 51 million – Total number of registered users on Flickr.
• 4.5 million – Number of photos uploaded to Flickr each day.
• 6 billion – Photos hosted on Flickr (August 2011).
• 1 – Apple iPhone 4 is the most popular camera on Flickr.

What’s in store for 2012?

For 2012, there’s every reason to think that the Internet, by any measure, will keep growing. As we put more of our personal as well as professional lives online, we will come to rely on the Internet in ways we could hardly imagine before. For better or worse, the Internet is now a critical component in almost everything we do.

We will be back again early next year to wrap up 2012. In the meantime, you may also want to check out our annual summaries for 2008, 2009, and 2010.

The digital revolution has rewritten the laws of marketing. So why do B-schools insist on teaching outmoded notions of price, place, and promotion?

In 1960, Jerome McCarthy got a bright and amazingly resilient idea. All the components of a marketing strategy could be reduced to just Four P’s (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), the 32-year-old marketing professor claimed.

There's a new golden rule in our hyper competitive markets.

And he was right, at least at the time. Those Four P’s have since become a tremendously influential guide in marketing programs. Although the world of marketing has changed significantly since the '60s, all MBA students, marketers, and strategy consultants are still expected to know and apply the Four P’s as if they were laws of nature. Some would argue that the digital revolution has yet to radically change the teachings of the Four P’s.

But a closer look at some of today’s fastest-growing brands shows that time has buried the Four P’s. Companies can no longer use them to gain a competitive advantage and meaningful differentiation. In fact, they more and more look like the roadmap to failure.

The Three Dead P's

Let’s look at promotion. In recent years, we have seen the explosive growth of companies that don’t do any advertising at all. Zara, one of the largest and fastest-growing fashion brands, never advertises. Facebook didn’t grow to 800 million users through any type of promotion. And although the company thrives off advertising, Google only recently started to advertise.

In the Plex, a new book about the rise of Google, Steven Levy tells the story of how Google’s first VP of marketing Scott Epstein suggested an elaborate marketing plan based on the Four P’s. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page rejected his plan outright, and Epstein left the company shortly thereafter. “It really came down to this,” a Google employee told Levy, “do we want to put money into the technology, into the infrastructure, into hiring really great people? Or do we want to blow it on a marketing campaign we can’t measure?”

Google didn’t need marketing; the search engine was so good that it spoke for itself. Few companies are lucky to have such a powerful product, but the essential rationale is the same for everyone: A penny spent on campaigns is a penny less spent on creating user value. In a transparent, digitally empowered world, only the best offerings survive, so companies that spend on promotions have a cost disadvantage.

Importantly, the decline of promotion does not mean that brands don’t matter; it just means that their value hinges less on costly marketing campaigns.

The other P’s are just as dispensable. Place is obviously becoming less and less important as more commerce moves online. And price is also less of a potential strategic marketing advantage. With price, comparison sites like Tripadvisor.com, Pricegrabber.com, and Bizrate.com, many companies are forced to let raw market forces determine the price of their products.

A penny spent on ads is a penny less spent on user value.

Only Product Matters

So what is today’s marketer left with as a way to build a strategic advantage? The product. The only real way for a company to build a growing brand is to design products and services that are so good that they become marketing vehicles in and of themselves. Or put in broader economic terms: The golden rule for today’s hyper competitive and information-rich markets is this:

The only way you can increase the value of your brand is by increasing the value of your offering.

That value isn't defined solely by greater usability, though that's a part of it; value is to a greater and greater degree determined by the emotional connection a user has to a product. Great design creates emotional value. Bold social actions by a company and great, or even free, services do the same. But in the post-advertising world, there is no simple formula for creating emotional value--apart from producing an outstanding product.

This One-P marketing rule will have profound ramifications for how companies organize their marketing, split their marketing budget, and integrate product development, design, and brand building--not to mention for the $450-billion-plus/year marketing industry. But at least one “P” will be easier to learn than four.
***

Written by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen.

Rasmus Bech Hansen is London-based strategy director at Venturethree, a global brand consultancy. He writes on how brands can do well by doing good and has helped to re-launch the United Nations Global Compact brand, the world’s most successful CSR initiative.

Skibsted Ideation

Skibsted Ideation is a design agency created by Jens Martin Skibsted, the founder of bicycle company Biomega. In 2009 he co-founded the product design super-group KiBiSi ... Read more

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via thedenveregotist.com

If you missed it a few weeks ago, The New York Times wrote a piece about redefining public relations.

You see, the last time PR was defined was in 1982. Yes, 30 years ago.

And, in the last five years, our industry has completely been turned on its head.

All of the journalists we spent our entire careers building relationships with were suddenly unemployed.

Companies began to rush to figure out how to make money with the newest and shiniest penny.

Paid and earned media had a new sibling: Owned media.

And marketing, public relations, and advertising began the “who owns this” fight.

But we’re entering a new year—a year in which all of these things are meeting their mid-level experience.

So it’s time to think about the key skills you need to have going into 2012 and beyond.

Search engine optimization

It makes sense that a lot of the content that is being produced comes out of PR. We’ve always been writers and readers. Now we have to take that skill and learn how to optimize our content, so it’s being crawled by the search engines, while also being highly valuable and engaging.

Search engine marketing

This doesn’t typically fall into a PR pro’s toolbox because it’s pay-per-click and ads. But if you don’t have an understanding of how it works, how to do A/B testing, and what to do with the results, you won’t be #winning.

Content marketing

Content goes beyond the white papers and advertorials we’re accustomed to doing. It’s videos and podcasts and blogs and emails and eBooks and more. The thing about content marketing is, if you don’t do it yourself, you’ll never truly understand it.

Start yourself a personal Tumblr blog, get on WordPress, or even try out Blogger (though it’s not as good as the others). When you are developing content for something personal, you begin to understand the applications it has for clients, as well as how to build community.

Inbound marketing

This goes hand-in-hand with content marketing because it is all about the engaging and valuable content you’re creating. But it’s driving leads. So you’re going to write content that drives people to your site and encourages them to buy. Content that has headlines around what people search.

For instance, one of the highest read blog posts on my blog, Spin Sucks, is “PR vs. marketing.” That’s because people search that term and we have content to fulfill their need (plus a webinar they can buy on it).

Integration

Next year is going to be the year of integration. PR is going to work with sales. Marketing is going to work with advertising. Customer service is going to work with product development.

Instead of the silos we’re all accustomed to having, we’ll become a hub where information is shared and the left and right hands know what the other is doing. No longer will we have the “who owns this” fight.

Results

Gone are the days of media impressions and advertising equivalencies. You need to gain yourself some business knowledge (how the company makes money) and some marketing expertise (how to target audiences to buy, using owned media). This is the only way you’ll understand how the work you’re doing is not just generating sales, but creating profit.

It’s a great time to be in this industry. We get to learn, expand our horizons, and get out of our comfort boxes. So go do it.

Gini Dietrich is founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, Inc. This article first appeared on Buzz Bin, the CRT/Tanaka blog, and on Spin Sucks.

via @carolinaki

I'd say that in about half of my business conversations, I have almost no idea what other people are saying to me. The language of internet business models has made the problem even worse. When I was younger, if I didn't understand what people were saying, I thought I was stupid. Now I realize that if it's to people's benefit that I understand them but I don't, then they're the ones who are stupid.

There are at least five strains of this epidemic.

Abstractionitis
We have forgotten how to use the real names of real things. Like doorknobs. Instead, people talk about the idea of doorknobs, without actually using the word "doorknob." So a new idea for a doorknob becomes "an innovation in residential access." Expose yourself repeatedly to the extrapolation of this practice to things more complicated than a doorknob and you really just need to carry Excedrin around with you all day.

Acronymitis
This is a disease of epic proportions in the world of charity. I was at a meeting just two days ago at which several well-meaning staff members of a charity were presenting to their board, and the meat of their discussion revolved around the acronyms SCEA and some other one that began with "R" that I can't recall. In the span of three minutes these acronyms must have been used eight times each. They were central to any understanding of the topic at hand, but they were never defined. So I had not the vaguest idea what the presenters were talking about. None. Could have been talking about how to make a beurre-blanc sauce for all I know.

Valley Girl 2.0
My partner and I were at a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley five years ago, and a real-live Valley girl was sitting in the booth behind us talking on her cell phone. We couldn't stop listening to her. She had a world-class ability to string together half-sentences devoid of any substance whatsoever. And yet you felt as if something important were being discussed! "And she was like, ummm, and I was just like, you know, umm, no way, really, like, yeah, and when she was like that, I was just like..umm...." She could go on in this way for extended periods of time without mentioning any actual people, actions, or thoughts. There's a business version of this illness. It involves the use of words such as "space," "around," "synergy," and "value-add" with a healthy dose of equivocators like "sort of" and "kind of" to ensure that there is no commitment to anything being said: "I'm in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people's work around this kind of space." Oh, OK, that explains it.

Meaningless Expressions
I wrote about the phrase "thinking outside the box" recently and how overused and utterly misunderstood the expression is. There are many more. Another term that has lost its meaning is "Let's exceed the customer's expectations." Employees who hear it just leave the pep rally, inhabit some kind of temporary dazed intensity, and then go back to doing things exactly the way they did before the speech. Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer's expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? I was at a Hilton a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, "Our goal is to exceed the customer's expectation." The best way to start would be to take down that bullshit sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do. My expectation is not to have signs around that tell me you want to exceed my expectations.

Abstract Valley Girl 2.0 Acronymitis Using Meaningless Expressions
This is when you combine the four diseases above. So you get phrases like, "You should meet this guy with the SIO. He's sort of this kind of social entrepreneur thinking outside of the box in the sustainability space and working on these ideas around sort of web-based social media, and he's in a round two capital raise in the VP space with the people at SVNP." How many times have you heard what you now recall to be precisely this sentence?

This would all be funny if it weren't true. People just don't make sense anymore. You'll save yourself a lot of trouble if you internalize this. Observe it, deconstruct it, and appreciate just how ridiculous most business conversation has become.

You will gain tremendous credibility, become much more productive, make those around you much more productive, and experience a great deal more joy in your working life if you look someone in the eye after hearing one of these verbal brain jammers and tell the person, "I don't have any idea what you just said to me."