In the first quarter of 2010, Facebook became the largest display advertiser, serving 176.3 billion display ads, versus Yahoo who served 131.6 billion banner ads according to new comScore numbers. The measurement is only of display ads within the company websites, not those included through external networks. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the large reach of Facebook ads has not yet translated into equivalent revenue streams.

While Facebook is expected to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year, it’s a fraction of the revenue being generated by Yahoo, who earned $6.5 billion last year, much of which came from advertising. The growth of Facebook ads is impressive. As Jessica Vascellaro points out, “Nielsen Co., another measurement firm, found that Facebook’s share of the U.S. display-ad market grew to 20% in April 2010, up from 2% in April 2009.”

While Facebook may not have translated all that traffic into equivalent revenue, there’s no doubt that Facebook is growing their base of businesses using the service. In addition to global corporations who are funding Facebook’s growth, a growing number of small businesses are turning to Facebook for promotional purposes. Performance advertisers and affiliate advertisers have also been pouring money into Facebook Ads as the site’s audience continues to skyrocket.

While Facebook hasn’t publicly stated any recent projections on revenue, we’d expect that the company’s ad revenue will continue to grow, reflecting the massive growth in dominance of display ads on the web.

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According to multiple sources we’ve spoken with over the past few weeks, RockYou will be the third partner to work with Facebook on their growing Credits platform. The other two partners, TrialPay and Peanut Labs, have been working with Facebook to power their offers and surveys integration with Facebook Credits, respectively. With $119 million in funding, many have wondered whether or not RockYou would be able to build a fledgling business.

With ongoing business challenges, and a need to justify a massive valuation, it sounds as though this partnership with Facebook could potentially turn out to be a life-saving one if it turns out to be accurate. How RockYou will integrate with Facebook Credits is not yet clear, however according to the people we’ve spoken to, RockYou is expected to power some form of ad network for Facebook Credits.

While we’re still trying to find out the complete details, it sounds as though the service will promote in-application opportunities to generate Facebook credits. Despite the unclear integration with Credits, it’s pretty clear that Facebook is looking for more opportunities for users to earn Credits and to promote those opportunities.

Just today Techcrunch posted about Facebook’s expansion of offers integration outside of applications. While Facebook is expanding the opportunities to earn Credits, integration with developers has been limited to a closed set of partners, and it sounds as though it will stay that way for now.

How successful Facebook Credits will be is not yet known as it appears to be an ongoing source of tension with developers. Zynga, for example, is looking to drive users off of the Facebook Platform to their own standalone site, in order to decrease the company’s dependance on Facebook. Despite the push, it’s pretty common knowledge that user acquisition of the Facebook Platform is much more expensive.

As such, in-app Facebook Credits integration could become a pretty large business for Facebook. If the multiple sources we’ve spoken to over the past few weeks are accurate, RockYou will be the next partner to power another aspect of Facebook Credits.

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After several days in the dark, the data feed from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service came back online over the weekend after an upgrade, following an outage that lasted twice as long as originally expected. Online real estate service Redfin told users Sunday afternoon that it was back up and running with new listings for the Seattle region. The outage also affected other online real estate services and the web sites of traditional real estate brokers.

So what happened? In a message to brokers on Saturday, the NWMLS said it encountered two unexpected problems during the upgrade.

During the cutover from Locator to Matrix, a planned downtime for the IDX data feed to broker web sites was communicated as part of the cutover process. This downtime was expected to last from Tuesday, May 4, 12:00 noon, until shortly after noon on Thursday, May 6. However, at the expected time to reactivate the data feed we detected some unexpected data irregularities, which would have been inconsistent with the data feed expected by the IDX vendors.

NWMLS Staff, working with Tarasoft, worked that Thursday through Friday evening correcting these data irregularities. On Friday evening May 7 a full updated data file was posted for all IDX vendors to use to update their broker web sites. Unfortunately, we became aware on Saturday morning that many IDX vendors were unable to access the data file due to a security permissions error. That situation was corrected at 11:00 a.m. and all IDX users now have access to the updated file. A final piece to this process is for the regular continual updating of broker web sites with IDX data and photos is anticipated to be in place and working sometime this evening and into the early morning.

Northwest Multiple Listing Service truly regrets this interruption to the continual flow of accurate data to your web sites. We are proud of the track record that we have maintained for many years in providing the most state-of-the-art data delivery process in the industry. We recognize though that this downtime, expected to be two days, lasted almost four days. Providing you with the best service is our number one goal and we apologize for the inconvenience that we have caused you, your agents, and your clients and customers. We remain committed to serving your needs and look forward to continuously earning your trust and support.

For buyers and sellers of homes in the Seattle region, the situation should make for an interesting scramble here at the beginning of the week. Just as an example, my own Redfin daily email update — which typically contains, at most, three properties matching my search parameters — delivered 15 new listings this morning, catching up for the past five days.

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Making good on a promise two months ago, Microsoft today updated its Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) preview, a sneak peek that targets Web developers and others eager to try out the company’s next browser.

“The Platform Preview continues to be the thinnest possible wrapper around the Web platform, and as such is not intended for general purpose browsing,” cautioned Dean Hachamovich, the browser team’s general manager, in an entry on the IE blog today.

In mid-March, Microsoft committed to updating the IE9 preview every eight weeks until it issues a public beta. The company again declined to reveal its timeline plans for a beta or a final of the next-generation browser.

Microsoft also updated the supporting IE9 Test Drive site with new samples to show what developers can do with its graphics processor-powered HTML, a key feature of the browser that boosts text and graphics rendering by offloading those chores to the PC’s GPU (graphics processor unit).

IE9′s preview will not run on the nearly-nine-year-old Windows XP, because the browser relies on APIs (application programming interfaces) built into Windows 7 and added to Vista and Server 2008 R2 in October 2009. The final version won’t run in XP either, Microsoft has confirmed.

Hachamovich claimed that the second IE9 preview renders JavaScript about 20% faster than the March edition, and 36% faster than Mozilla’s Firefox 3.6. Microsoft’s early code, however, still lags behind the leaders — Apple ‘s Safari, Google ‘s Chrome and Opera Software’s Opera — in SunSpider benchmark scores. Opera, for instance, was half again as fast as IE9′s Platform Preview 2.

Microsoft’s results nearly match those of recent Computerworld SunSpider tests, which showed that Chrome’s newest beta was almost 20% faster than the current “stable” build, and that Opera continued to take honors as the fastest Windows browser.

The company also touted progress in the widely-used Acid3 benchmark, which checks how closely a browser follows certain standards, particularly specifications related to DOM (Document Object Model), CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets 2) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Hachamovich said IE9 Platform Preview 2 scored 68 out of a possible 100 on Acid3, an improvement over the 55 scored by Platform Preview 1.

Unlike full-fledged editions of IE, the IE9 preview runs alongside existing versions of IE, such as IE7 on Vista or IE8 on Windows 7. Users can install the update overtop the March edition, Microsoft said.

Microsoft has said nothing about its goals for IE9′s adoption, but the company has to be concerned with the gradual decline of Internet Explorer’s usage share, which has been on a downward line for years and shows no sign of heading upward. The most recent data from Web analytics firm NetApplications puts IE’s usage share at just under 60%, a record low.

IE8 has not been able to turn that around. Since IE8′s March 2009 launch, Microsoft has lost 7.8 percentage points in usage share, only slightly less than the 9.2 points it lost in the 12 months preceding IE8′s debut.

The second preview is a 15MB download, and can be obtained from Microsoft’s site .

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld . Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@ix.netcom.com .

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SAN DIEGO, May 5 /PRNewswire/ — Anametrix (http://anametrix.com), the leader in cloud-based business analytics technology, announced the appointment of Jerome Rota, co-founder of DivX.  As Vice President of Product Marketing at Anametrix, Rota will oversee the build-out of the InstaVista™ platform to support explosive client acquisition in 2010.

(Logo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100308/ANAMETRIXLOGO)

Jerome Rota is the original designer of the DivX video compression technology and co-founder of DivX, Inc.  As a brilliant engineer, Jerome has overseen codec development as well as led teams to introduce new platforms, products and services.  He still serves on the Board of Directors of DivX, which became a publicly traded NASDAQ company in 2006. Rota will continue to be a global technology visionary and spokesperson at Anametrix.

“Jerome Rota and I share the distinction of being the only French founders of San Diego based companies that have become public, DivX and WebSideStory,” stated Blaise Barrelet, Anametrix CEO.  “Jerome has spearheaded cultural shifts around the world by leveraging the power of the Internet to streamline video sharing.  His long-sighted product leadership will drive the adoption of the InstaVista™ platform and will be instrumental in building Anametrix as a billion dollar business analytics technology company.”

“To define the cloud-based business analytics market is an exhilarating proposition,” Jerome Rota added.  “Anametrix serves a significant business need by solving for the prohibitive cost and time limitations of traditional business intelligence deployments.  I am pleased to join this proven world-class analytics team to expand the Anametrix InstaVista™  platform and offer clear, actionable business insights to new customers around the globe.”

Through an intuitive Software as a Service (SaaS) interface, Anametrix InstaVista™ offers immediate self-service business insights across multiple applications including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), social media, search engine marketing (SEM), video & audio, e-commerce, and web analytics.

About Anametrix, Inc.

Anametrix, Inc. is a privately funded next generation business analytics company whose InstaVista™ solution is delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS).  A high-performance data management infrastructure handles data integration, statistical analysis, and other compute-intensive functions to seamlessly manage online, offline, and multi-channel corporate objectives.  Founded in 2009 by analytics industry experts Blaise Barrelet and Anders Olsson, Anametrix provides cloud-based solutions that allow for quick and precise decision making from the correlation of vast amounts of data. Self-directed business insights are readily accessible across organizations, from sales staff to C-level.  For more information, please visit http://anametrix.com, call (858)558-8230 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (858)558-8230      end_of_the_skype_highlighting x333 or email publicrelations@anametrix.com

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YARDLEY, PA, May 04, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Harte-Hanks, Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!hhs/quotes/nls/hhs  (HHS  14.07, -0.39, -2.70%)  is proud to announce the expansion of the marketing strategy team at The Agency Inside Harte-Hanks with the addition of three new team members: Jennifer Pineda-Bodnar, vice president, strategy & business development; Patricia Crowell, vice president, strategy & business development; and Leslie Schultz, senior director, digital strategy.

Jeannine Falcone, managing director of The Agency Inside, commented, “The marketing landscape is more complex than ever before, and the tools and talent we use are evolving, too. We have been leading our clients in innovative strategies and engagement plans; however, additional marketing strategy expertise, particularly within digital and social media, ensures that our clients are continually at the forefront of industry trends and techniques.”

With more than 15 years in senior-level marketing positions — including brand leader for Nexium and vice president, product marketing and communications for MasterCard, Pineda-Bodnar brings a sophisticated and advanced level of expertise to the Strategy and Insight team. She developed, launched and promoted products, services and multichannel marketing campaigns across several verticals including medical devices, pharmaceuticals, financial services, high tech, telecommunications, business services, and office electronics. Pineda-Bodnar is a results-oriented leader with a track record of top performance in a broad range of marketing disciplines. She can quickly analyze a company’s strategic vision and translate into effective marketing strategies that drive business results and ROI.

Patricia Crowell has spent the past 15 years overseeing marketing strategies for top brands in the pharmaceutical and high tech industries. She was a founding team member in the establishment of Dell Online where she pioneered the use of digital and new media in the technology sector; she then leveraged her experience to build digital strategy programs in the pharmaceutical industry with Lexapro, Medco and Wyeth. Crowell also created and produced the social media property “The Wine Scout” which includes vidcasting, podcasting and wine tasting community. With an emphasis on digital marketing and social media marketing in particular, Crowell provides a hybrid of effective technology leadership and marketing strategy expertise to produce multimedia and interactive marketing solutions for innovative businesses. Her calculated insights identify strategic business opportunities and provide innovative, measurable solutions for her clients.

Both Bodnar and Crowell are part of the Strategy and Insight team reporting into Michele Fitzpatrick, senior vice president of strategy for The Agency Inside, where they will work hand-in-hand with the account teams and the rest of the Strategy and Insight team to develop innovative, multichannel marketing strategies that drive measurable results for The Agency Inside’s client base.

Leslie Schultz has been developing and leading digital and integrated marketing strategy for over 15 years in pharmaceutical, biotechnology, high tech and publishing industries. Most recently, as the director of marketing for The Scientist Publishing Group, she led all marketing and new market development for the multimedia publishing company including the creation of social media strategies and the launch of digital publishing initiatives. She has also held senior and director-level strategy and marketing positions at Gateway, Capital One, Rx.com and Cox Interactive Media. As senior director of digital strategy, reporting to Jeannette Kocsis, senior vice president of digital strategy for The Agency Inside, Schultz develops and leads comprehensive digital strategies for the agency’s clients, including social media marketing, online channel development, interactive media planning, and mobile marketing. Her expertise is integrating digital media and channels into marketing plans and developing one-to-one social and mobile brand experiences.

Falcone added, “These strategic appointments reflect what we see as the future of marketing — strategic, multichannel relationship building. We are excited to bring this talent to our clients.”

About Harte-Hanks(R) Harte-Hanks, Inc. is a worldwide, direct and targeted marketing company that provides direct marketing services and shopper advertising opportunities to local, regional, national and international consumer and business-to-business marketers. Harte-Hanks Direct Marketing improves return on its clients’ marketing investment by helping them to turn data into insight, and insight into programs that identify, acquire and retain customers, and grow customer value. Visit the Harte-Hanks Web site at http://www.harte-hanks.com or call (800) 456-9748.

This document may contain trademarks that are owned or licensed by Harte-Hanks, Inc. and its subsidiaries, including, without limitation, Harte-Hanks(R). All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders.

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Want to instantly add Facebook’s Like button to your WordPress blog? No need to worry about dealing with Facebook’s upgraded JavaScript SDK or anything else. You can simply install the new WordPress Like plugin and get up and running in only a couple of clicks. The new plugin works with both XFBML and as an iFrame. While there are some challenges of using Like button’s with the old Facebook Connect library, this new plugin should make implementing the Like button easy for WordPress site administrators.

Pierre Chambon, the developer of the WordPress Like plugin, has told us that the add on has seen significant traction over the weekend as it has been translated into 5 languages and will be translated into an additional 3 in the near future. There’s also an interesting option to create separate Facebook Pages for each of your articles, although this is something that Facebook has advised against.

Instead, Facebook prefers that Open Graph objects (which are subsequently turned into Facebook Pages) be a reflection of “real-life things”. As they state within their Open Graph documentation, “users don’t want news articles and other transient content as objects on their profile”. Despite not wanting this, there is clearly an incentive for developers to essentially spam the Open Graph system, something that I’m sure Facebook will create further restrictions around.

While best practices are still being developed for the Facebook Open Graph API, owners of WordPress blogs can now easily implement Facebook’s like button, with this simple plugin. Go download the Facebook Like plugin now and let us know what you think!

Also, if you’re interested in learning about developing for the social web, come check out Social Developer Summit this June in San Francisco!

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CALABASAS, Calif., Apr 29, 2010 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) — NetSol Technologies, Inc. (“NetSol”) /quotes/comstock/15*!ntwk/quotes/nls/ntwk  (NTWK  0.83, +0.01, +0.59%) (Nasdaq Dubai:NTWK), a U.S. corporation providing global business services and enterprise application solutions to private and public sector organizations worldwide, is set to reveal a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering for its smartOCI(TM) search engine at SAP’s SAPPHIRE(R) NOW conference being held May 16-19, 2010 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla. Hosted by SAP AG, the SAPPHIRE NOW show brings together software industry leaders to share and demonstrate innovative solutions running on-premise, on-demand or on-device to enable real-time decision-making. NetSol Technologies will be exhibiting at Booth Number 3415b.

NetSol’s smartOCI(TM) 1.0 is a new search engine technology developed to provide corporate buyers and shoppers a simple and intuitive user interface to search multiple supplier catalogs simultaneously within the SAP SRM application. Designed for customers who currently run the SAP Supplier Relationship Management eProcurement platform, smartOCI(TM) is delivered through the SaaS distribution model, where software applications are remotely hosted and users can securely access them from anywhere with an Internet connection.

The beta program for smartOCI(TM) 1.0, now employed by six customers, is set to end May 10, and the solution is currently pending SAP certification. NetSol will offer special “QuickStart” pricing packages to SAP customers attending the SAPPHIRE NOW event.

Najeeb Ghauri, Chairman and CEO of NetSol, commented: “We wanted to provide our customers with a solution that drives immediate and real value to procurement organizations without upfront hardware, software license and maintenance costs. Deploying our smartOCI(TM) search engine as a SaaS offering allows us to achieve this goal.”

About NetSol Technologies, Inc.

NetSol Technologies, Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!ntwk/quotes/nls/ntwk (NTWK 0.83, +0.01, +0.59%) (Nasdaq Dubai:NTWK) is a worldwide provider of global IT and enterprise application solutions. Since its inception in 1995, NetSol has used its BestShoring(TM) practices and highly experienced resources in analysis, development, quality assurance, and implementation to deliver high-quality, cost-effective solutions. Specialized by industry, these product and services offerings include credit and finance portfolio management systems, SAP consulting and services, custom development, systems integration, and technical services for the global Financial, Leasing, Insurance, Energy, and Technology markets. NetSol’s commitment to quality is demonstrated by its achievement of the ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and SEI (Software Engineering Institute) CMMI (Capability Maturity Model) Maturity Level 5 assessments, a distinction shared by fewer than 100 companies worldwide. NetSol Technologies’ clients include Fortune 500 manufacturers, global automakers, financial institutions, utilities, technology providers, and government agencies. Headquartered in Calabasas, California, NetSol Technologies has operations and offices in Alameda, Adelaide, Bangkok, Beijing, Karachi, Lahore, London, and Riyadh.

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http://www.cmocouncil.org/news/pr/2010/041910.asp, B2B marketing trends are shifting more towards the digital realm.

The report, which surveyed more than 600 marketing firms, indicated that 46 percent of the respondents would be shifting more of their budgets to digital demand generation and online relationship building. Most firms said they would be focusing on fine-tuning customer data to better target and segment their audience, while some will be exploring new digital routes.

The growing shift from traditional marketing to digital market is also beginning to show its effects on some marketing firms’ hiring practices. The report indicates that 59 percent of the firms were looking to retrain existing staff on digital marketing practices, while 40 percent were adding or expanding their digital marketing agency.

“Globalization of markets and new channels of digital engagement are causing senior corporate marketers to seek new internal skills and capabilities, and re-direct spend towards more inventive and localized go-to-market programs,” says Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council. “The transformation of marketing organizations, practices and functions is well underway.”

This mirrors findings reported by eConsultancy. According to its report, digital ad spend in North America is expected to increase to $16 billion.

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Salesforce and VMWare have big news today with the pre-announcement of VMForce.  Inevitably it will be less big than the hype that’s sure to come, but that’s no knock on the platform, which looks pretty cool.  Fellow Enterprise Irregular and Salesforce VP Anshu Sharma provides an excellent look at VMForce.

What is VMForce and how is it different from Force.com?

There is a lot to like about Force.com and a fair amount to dislike.  Let’s start with Force.com’s proprietary not-quite-Java language.  Suppose we could dump that language and write vanilla Java?  Much better, and this is exactly what VMForce offers.  Granted, you will need to use the Spring framework with your Java, but that’s not so bad.  According to Larry Dignan and Sam Diaz, Spring is used with over half of all Enterprise Java projects and 95% of all bug fixes to Apache Tomcat.  That’s some street cred for sure.

Okay, that eliminates the negative of the proprietary language, but where are the positives?

Simply put, there is a rich set of generic SaaS capabilities available to your application on this platform.   Think about all the stuff that’s in Salesforce.com’s applications that isn’t specific to the application itself.   These are capabilities any SaaS app would love to have on tap.  They include:
Search: Ability to search any and all data in your enterprise apps
Reporting: Ability to create dashboards and run reports, including the ability to modify these reports
Mobile: Ability to access business data from mobile devices ranging from BlackBerry phones to iPhones
Integration: Ability to integrate new applications via standard web services with existing applications
Business Process Management: Ability to visually define business processes and modify them as business needs evolve
User and Identity Management: Real-world applications have users! You need the capability to add, remove, and manage not just the users but what data and applications they can have access to
Application Administration: Usually an afterthought, administration is a critical piece once the application is deployed
Social Profiles: Who are the users in this application so I can work with them?
Status Updates: What are these users doing? How can I help them and how can they help me?
Feeds: Beyond user status updates, how can I find the data that I need? How can this data come to me via Push? How can I be alerted if an expense report is approved or a physician is needed in a different room?
Content Sharing: How can I upload a presentation or a document and instantly share it in a secure and managed manner with the right set of co-workers?

Pretty potent stuff.  The social features, reporting, integration, and business process management are areas that seem to be just beyond the reach of a lot of early SaaS apps.  It requires a lot of effort to implement all that, and most companies just don’t get there for quite a while.  I know these were areas that particularly distinguished my old company Helpstream against its competition.  Being able to have them all in your offering because the platform provides them is worth quite a lot.

There is also a lot of talk about how you don’t have to set up the stack, but I frankly find that a lot less compelling than these powerful “instant features” for your program.  The stack just isn’t that hard to manage any more.  Select the right machine image and spin it up on EC2 and you’re done.

That’s all good to great.  I’m not aware of another Platform that offers all those capabilities, and a lot of the proprietary drawbacks to Force.com have been greatly reduced, although make no mistake, there is still a lot to think about before diving into the platform without reservation.  Force.com has had some adoption problems (I’m sure Salesforce would dispute that), and I have yet to meet a company that wholeheartedly embraced the platform rather than just trying to use it as an entre to the Salesforce ecosystem (aka customers and demand generation).

What are the caveats?

First, this is just an early glimpse.  You can’t actually go try this thing out and pricing isn’t even being talked about until this year.   Historically, pricing has been another Achilles Heel of the Force platform, although I know Anshu disagrees with me on that one.  We got our Helpstream service to the point where it cost 5 cents per seat per year to deliver the service.  Don’t be surprised if VMForce is a LOT more expensive than that.  Second, ISV’s will also have to wonder whether Salesforce is friend or foe.  At Helpstream, we finally got comfortable with the idea that they are a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  Their product organization viewed us as competitors, and would’ve been only to happy to wipe us off the face of the Earth.  Meanwhile, we were getting around a hundred leads a month from being on the AppExchange and they were good quality leads.  We were able to appear at Dreamforce, and it was a good venue for us.

But VMForce represents a much higher degree of collaboration.  Take advantage of all those juicy services and it will be hard to back out of that platform, Java or no Java.  There just isn’t anything else like it, and that’s the real distinction of VMForce.com.  It’s a brilliant repackaging of some great functionality from the Salesforce apps as a platform.  What remains is to see if Salesforce can behave itself and act like Switzerland the way a platform vendor is supposed to.  And don’t overlook what kinds of data will now be completely beholden to that Swiss Data Bank.  The heavy focus on Social will be very powerful.  In the broadest sense, CRM is a system of record for what your customers and prospects are doing.

On balance, I think Salesforce has tee’d up a potential game changer for the SaaS platform world.  Whether or not ISV’s get comfortable with the Swiss angle, Corporate IT should find a lot to like here from the get-go.  VMForce also seems like a rich opportunity for the Salesforce ecosystem of SI’s and VAR’s to add value too.  Salesforce has listened and learned and seems to be on the right track.  I don’t see it as an Amazon killer, but rather as a welcome new addition to the Clouds that’s going to enable new things we haven’t seen before.

Two thumbs up for now and let’s see how things develop.

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