The folks at EQO used their IM network to investigate on the use of IM services by country, check out Global Instant Messaging Market Share – Open Data:

It seems almost unfathomable that there can be networks with active accounts numbering in the 100 MMs to billions and total accounts certainly in the billions for which there is no detailed public market share data.

Based on EQO’s IM interconnect capability we’ve been able to take a look inside the major IM networks to see the competitive landscape and broken down the stats by country – and like any good disruptive player we thought the data should be public.

Some results from the report: AIM: USA (36% market share); GTalk: India (35%), Japan (26%) and South Africa (26%); Yahoo!IM is faved by India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia (>50%-70%);  ICQ is strong in Germany (44%) and Russia (56%).

Very, very interesting data if you need to do some research on IM services and worldwide usage. You will miss some networks in this report though, e.g. they don’t connect to Skype – so no numbers about this service.

Do you have further insights and information about the IM market? Let us know in the comments!

If you’ve heard of the movie Star Wreck, then you’re already familiar with Star Wreck Studio’s operating procedure: Take a community of thousands of online movie-making buffs, and have them collaborate on a feature-length film.

Star Wreck, a $20,000 film, is said to be the most popular internet-created feature film of all time, with eight million downloads all around the world. At first the film was distributed free online, and eventually it was distributed by Universal Pictures as a premium DVD.

But the folks behind Star Wreck — Star Wreck Studios, based in Tampere, Finland — want to be more than just a one-hit wonder. They’ve now built up a permanent community site for their movie-making collaborators. The community’s called Wreck-a-Movie, and it’s already hard at work on two new film projects: A science fiction comedy about Nazis on the moon, Iron Sky, and a horror film called Sauna. On Wreck-a-Movie anybody interested in film can join the community and make plot and music proposals and comment on scenes.

This is the preview of the Star Wreck movie – Imperial Edition:

And the venture beat post goes on with:

Star Wreck Studios compares its film projects to social networking and internet copyright-modifying movements such as Creative Commons. The intent is to create productions that are “clean” from a copy right perspective. That’s why the crew behind Wreck-a-Movie considers Creative Commons (CC) licensing to be very important, and Star Wreck Studios has John Buckman, one of the thought leaders on the use of CC in business, as chairman of the board.

Star Wreck Studios isn’t just about collaborative movie making, it’s also about collaborative movie viewing. It expects to use mobile technology, not only to view the content, but to create interactive experiences for its audience. For example, if you’re watching a horror flick, as a part of the plot, your phone rings, and when you answer, the person on the other end of the line is the main character of the movie.
“Because of the connected nature of mobile phones there are a lot of opportunities to do things like that. AppleTV, PlayStation 3 and mobile phones are all connected,” says Peter Vesterbacka, a cofounder and board member. He is also a cofounder of the global networking event Mobile Monday and a serial entrepreneur.

Check out the project and films realized using collaborative film making and online community efforts to drive the production of films.

Here is a picture of the MotionPlus, and what Nintendo says about it:

Nintendo’s upcoming Wii MotionPlus accessory for the revolutionary Wii Remote controller again redefines game control, by more quickly and accurately reflecting motions in a 3-D space. The Wii MotionPlus accessory attaches to the end of the Wii Remote and, combined with the accelerometer and the sensor bar, allows for more comprehensive tracking of a player’s arm position and orientation, providing players with an unmatched level of precision and immersion.

I really love Nintendo for innovating in the field of interface design in gaming and technology. Looking forward to checking this out and all the new possibilities this is opening up, to further spur game design.

Games publishers: Bring ‘em on!

This is what the Google Trends graph looks like for the search term “recession”:

Google Trends: term “recession” in searches and news.

I found a great article on “Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen” called Online advertising during a recession: 5 key trends for ad-based startups

Ultimately, the dynamics here are complex and uncertain, but here some of the key trends worth watching if you’re an advertising-based startup:

1. Accelerating movement of offline to online ad spend
2. Brand areas weak, direct response will be less affected
3. Weak areas to watch: Video, social networks, communication, etc.
4. Rise of direct-to-consumer revenues?
5. Timing is everything

A very interesting read, lots of good facts and links to other articles in there. Another good source with tips and advices is the article on folio called Selling Advertising in a Recession – How to convince marketers now is a good time to buy.

There could be a recession coming—or not—but some advertisers are behaving as if one has already started. Responding to media buyers looking to cut ad budgets has become a priority.

Let me know what your strategy is and if you have other great articles covering this topic.

A real-world MMO has one more advantage: Revenues. The opportunities for sponsorship, or for driving players to real-world locations to make real-world purchases, make Blizzard’s current revenues look tiny by comparison.

I think the Offline world is often overlooked when it comes to Online worlds and social media sites and the fact that it is very impotant to link the On- and Offline worlds together, let them interact.

Some of this is certainly happening with e.g. Facebook, Google, Yahoo! [... you name it] dev events, but why not for “everyone”, the normal user?

We live in a non-linear world but are taught linear business processes. Yikes. We’re doomed. Grab the Starburst and let’s head down to the cellar to hide.

It’s 2008. Wake up. Drink some Patron and lets start thinking rational: How do we harness our non-linear world?

New digital brief given to [insert agency name] by a client.
“Can someone put together a ComScore run?”
RFP the top 25 on the list
Media planning time …
[...]
Linear thinking would lead us to pick the same process over time and usually select the top sites on the list and work with them. Non-linear forces us to work harder and sometimes, chaotic, but allows us to participate in a non-linear world much better. With this said, we need to start developing the tools, processes and technologies to harness our knowledge in a non-linear world. I haven’t seen many tools that do this, but I’m certainly willing to listen.

Darren is asking for input on new ways and tools/technologies to support and tap into the new possibilities which arise in this very fragmented Online world.I think the “chaotic element” is what makes this question really challenging. How do you account = plan for this?

Are you gunning for the big properties or what is your process to target your audience?

So, we would have 16% of the internet users in the US “producing” content! A really significant number which needs to be reflected even more in marketing campaigns in 2012 than what we see today.

Let’s look at the numbers on the “consuming” side of the blogospere:

We’ll reach 70% of “blog readers” of all Internet users in the US. This underlines the important role blogs will inhabit by 2012 and how important it is for brands to “play nice” with the still young “communication channel”.

Next: What money will be spent on advertising on the pages of blogs in the US 2007-2012?

From the eMarketer article:

“A big factor driving the increases is the niche orientation of the blogosphere,” says Mr. Verna. 

“Once a haven for techies to communicate with each other in their own lingo, blogs have long since shed this mantle and tapped into the zeitgeist of American culture,” says Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, The Blogosphere: A Mass Movement from Grass Roots. “There are blogs for virtually everything under the sun, from celebrity gossip to political commentary to the most mundane personal minutiae.”

Are you writing your own blog or contribute to one?

MarketingVOX: ABC to Pump More Ads into Online Commercial Breaks

Starting this week, ABC will insert multiple commercials into ad breaks within shows streamed online. Each break typically serves one :15 or :30 commercial.

Because the medium is new, the standard for streaming TV shows is one spot per break. Some sites, like Hulu, give users the option of watching a single two-minute trailer at the beginning of a show, in exchange for an otherwise uninterrupted experience.

From AdAge.com: Adults Spend 1/2 Their Media Hours With TV

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — It seems marketers and TV executives are having a half-full, half-empty kind of argument over TV’s prowess. The results of a survey on consumer media habits commissioned by the Television Bureau of Advertising show that adult consumers spend a little over half of their media hours with TV. Meanwhile, a recent survey of marketers and advertisers by the Association of National Advertisers found many were losing confidence in TV as a medium.

From AdAge.com: Marketers Losing Confidence in TV

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Whether traditional TV advertising has truly lost its power, marketers and advertisers are already eager to find alternatives. The Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research’s fourth biennial TV and Technology survey shows a dramatic loss of confidence in the medium as the industry gears up to explore new ad formats and forms of video commercials.

Indeed, two thirds of the C-level-executive respondents said they are watching the medium closely, up from just half two years ago, and 87% of respondents said they were going to be spending more on web ads in the coming year. The study was conducted in January and is based on a survey of 78 leading advertisers across all major industries and categories. 

Well, no more, folks: Drop.io, a fairly innovative file-sharing service, sends and receives faxes for free.

It works like this: to send a fax, upload a document to Drop.io. Enter the fax number and click “Fax.” Boom — no beeps to haunt you in your sleep.
On the receiving end, Drop.io will generate a cover sheet you then e-mail to the sender. As long as they use your cover page on the fax, it will end up in your Drop.io account as a PDF.

It is true that a free fax service is always good to have But on the receiving side for this fax solution to work you need to provide a special cover sheet to receive it in your “drop” and becomes available to download. This makes it not a solution for sensitive data which you don’t intend to share freely (even if you make your drop private…. ).

This is how the site describes its service:

Drop.io enables you to create simple private exchange points called “drops.”

The service has no email signup and no “accounts.” Each drop is private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it. Create multiple drops, add any type of media, and share or subscribe as you want. 

And it gets even better: Drop.io supports different media types, like photos, videos and (text) posts! You also have the option to embed a widget in your blog or social network of choice. This enables visitors to upload and download files to/from your drop. You get 100MB per drop for free and you can add more storage for $10/GB. Embed the files located in your drop in another (e.g. blog) page and add comment to the files. This makes it a truly social app which should attract further users/traffic.

Please leave a comment and provide your feedback if you work with the service or want to test it out @ Drop.io!