New cameras can watch moviegoers to collect ‘powerful marketing data’

by David Silverberg

When you watch a film, you never expect the film to be watching you. But monitoring how filmgoers react to movies and ads may soon be part of the future of media marketing.

A new technology will build upon anti-piracy cameras used to monitor people illegally filming movies in theatres. Harnessing 2D and 3D cameras, the project “would be able to measure emotions, groupings and movement to ‘revolutionize market research’ at movie theatres,” the Toronto Star reports.

Led by Dr. Abdul Farooq of the Machine Vision Laboratory at the University of the West of England in Bristol, the technology aims to revamp market research so advertising companies can better learn how audiences react to their spots, for instance.

“Within the cinema industry this tool will feed powerful marketing data that will inform film directors, cinema advertisers and cinemas with useful data about what audiences enjoy and what adverts capture the most attention,” Farooq told the Daily Mail.

The cameras will capture both the facial reactions to what’s being projected on screen and also the audience as a whole, Farooq adds.

Capturing audience reactions to films is just the beginning, the project leaders believe.

“‘It is envisaged that once the technology has been fine-tuned it could be used by market researchers in all kinds of settings, including monitoring reactions to shop window displays,” said Farooq.

An interview with Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton on the future of journalism

By David Silverberg

A crowdsourced copy editing project. An equation to track a news site’s user engagement. How “public-interest news can be more valuable to publishers than traffic bait.” These are some of the issues analyzed by Nieman Journalism Lab (NJL), born out of Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation. Just over two years old, the website tracks news in the evolving journalism industry, offering stories on how old media adapt to the digital era and what new projects are emerging from tech trailblazers and start-ups. What makes the Lab tick and what new ideas are exciting media observers?

We spoke to NJL director Joshua Benton, who says the Lab has expanded immensely since he joined as the sole writer after nabbing a 2007 Nieman Fellowship. Now staffed with four full-time writers, NJL has welcomed more than 80 writers to contribute content to the site, some steadily and some freelance.

A former reporter for the Dallas Morning News, Benton says NJL stories are designed to look at how journalism is maturing in today’s digital era. “In this journalism revolution, lots of people are doing lots of interesting things,” he said in a phone interview. “Some are happening deep within news organizations and others in one-person start-ups or within tech companies. We’re the common point of conversation for all those people.”

NJL tends to investigate stories you won’t find in your local daily or magazine. For instance, writer Justin Ellis profiled MuckRock, a site which aims to make FOIA requests effortless; an interview with a computer science professor looked at digital forensics and photojournalism; and Benton wrote an insightful post on the economics behind news site paywalls. NJL also features sections with news from around the Web relating to media and journalism trends.

Benton says the stories on NJL should help journalists and editors “inform their judgment” on the volatile media space. NJL’s purpose is altruistic, Benton notes. “Our goal is to do our part to help journalism evolve and succeed.”

NJL doesn’t track what a media site such as Poynter’s Romenesko would follow, such as layoffs and paper closures. Instead, their writers analyze how new startups or media projects will help journalists adjust to the new realities presented by social and digital media.

“Traditional news organization want to increase the size and loyalty of their online audience,” Benton says. “When you look at news outlets with substantial online audiences, the numbers aren’t analogous to the loyalty of having a daily newspaper delivered to your house every day. ”

Benton says editors have to rethink how they value online relationships with their readers.

What trends excite him and NJL? Benton said the burgeoning mobile space is positioned for major growth and he believes there’s great potential in news apps which create a “walled garden around content compared to the Web, where the competition is just one click away.”

Benton also says he supports user-generated media, which he views as part of the news ecosystem. That said, he believes large news organizations will still produce the lion’s share of journalism in 20 years. Also, Benton believes “amplification” is the biggest obstacle for citizen journalism and user-generated content. ”If someone writes something journalistic he needs to find a way for that work to reach an audience,” he says.

When asked about printed media’s role in the future of journalism, Benton says printing a paper is still a money-maker for many outlets but he’s not sure what newspapers will look like in 10 or 20 years.

“People who are 50 today aren’t going to give up their newspapers anytime soon, but in the future it won’t be the ideal tool for mass media distribution,” he says.

Benton would like to see a balance between the players in the tech world who believe they will learn nothing from old-school media, and newspaper executives who think the Net is one big crowd of “know-nothings.”

“Both those point-of-views are equally wrong,” he says.

Looking at the future of Benton’s own workplace, he hints the Nieman Journalism Lab will soon be getting into hosting conferences and may also look at creating “centralized resources or databases” but he was mum on details. And as NJL’s site programmer, Benton also points out there may be a redesign or a few tweaks coming in the near future.

For more information on the Nieman Journalism Lab visit their website or join the 33,000+ people who are now following Nieman Lab on Twitter.

Aggregators step in to sort out growing ‘group-buying’ market

By Chris Hogg

Today, group-buying is all the rage online, with huge discounts offered in cities around the world. However, as copycats crop up each day to cash-in on the trend, it’s increasingly difficult for consumers to follow everything.

Group-buying online allows consumers to group together to get better deals or discounts when purchasing products or services. Using various new websites, consumers are given deals by email and the only catch ? and the reason why group-buying has been so successful ? is a minimum number of people need to buy the deal for it to become official. In order to hit the minimum numbers, consumers often encourage their friends to get in on the deals by sharing details of each deal through social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, ensuring the minimum numbers are met and helping companies to grow. It’s an ideal business model because everyone wins.

Getting deals online shows no sign of slowing down. It’s backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, it’s spreading into virtually every major market, and media companies are jumping in and acquiring start-ups.

The king of group-buying is still Groupon, a two-year-old Chicago start-up that has been called the fastest-growing company in Web history, generating an estimated $500 million in revenue this year.

This week Facebook also announced it was also getting into the business with the launch of the Facebook Deals platform.

Depending on the city you’re in, the list of companies that are emerging to offer group-buying can be dizzying. In Toronto, for example, there are at least 24 companies offering discounts on merchandise, restaurants, laser hair removal and more. There’s Groupon, Teambuy, LivingSocial, WagJag, to name a few.

The group-buying game has also become so niche that there are sites set up for sections within cities; in Toronto, there’s a site targeting people who walk through a large underground walkway called “PATH” and deals only come from businesses within the underground.

The explosion of daily deal sites leaves a lot of opportunities for consumers to save, but it can also be challenging to navigate through the dozens of local sites to see if one has a better offer than the other. And if you’re not interested in the yoga offer from one company, you may be interested in the restaurant discount from another. But who has time to visit dozens of group-buying sites to check out the deals?

That’s where Deal Page fits in, a start-up aggregating start-ups. With a quick glance, visitors can see every deal being offered in a particular city, all at once.

Founded by 22-year-old Wes Bos, Deal Page aims to provide a one-stop shop for everyone looking for deals in their region. The site was launched at the end of September and Bos says it’s expanding quickly just through word of mouth. It’s available in Canada only right now.

“Traffic is currently around 1,200 daily visitors and growing each week as people tell their family and friends,” Bos said in an email interview. “I love to create things and this was an excellent side project that I could continually improve on. I’m a Web designer and developer, so taking a break from client work to hack away at something like this has been really nice.”

Bos’ side project has grown from a Toronto deal page to catering to visitors in 11 cities across Canada. As the site gets more interest, Bos says he’s looking to expand.

“I just brought on another guy to work on the site with me, so we’re planning on launching in a lot more cities with support for RSS, email and mobile,” Bos said. “Right now we’re focused on Canada but looking at the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States to see what would be best to get into.”

So what’s in it for Bos? In addition to providing consumers with a website that lets consumers see all city deals in one place, Bos can also earn money by referring people to each service.

“My first group buy was for a coupon at a local pub,” Bos said. “I bought it and then shared the link on Facebook. A few days later I logged in and was surprised to see I made $40 [in referrals]. So once all these sites started to pop up, I was getting more and more email and I thought about creating a page that pulled in all of the latest deals in Toronto.”

Deal Page was created using publicly available data group-buying sites provide in order to spread themselves among the developer community. Using their APIs and what Bos calls “some secret sauce PHP scrips that run every few hours,” the site essentially creates itself dynamically using data provided to it.

Bos says he can put together a new deal page for a city in about 20 minutes or so, depending on what data is available.

With the rising popularity of these discount-deal sites, group-buying aggregators such as Deal Page are also increasing in popularity and Bos is not alone in the industry. DealGator and CakeDeals, to name a few, offers similar services.

“There are about 130 daily deal sites in North America right now,” Simon Wong, co-founder of CakeDeals, said in an email interview. “It was very inconvenient to visit multiple deal sites or to receive multiple emails every day. In order to make our own lives easier, we made a simple aggregator that allowed us to see all the deals in one place.”

CakeDeals launched a month ago around the same time as Deal Page and has attracted 10,000 visitors to the site in the last month. The company is running in 13 cities, including seven in Canada and six in the United States.

“One of the interesting use cases we discovered was that our users would subscribe to a foreign city before visiting it,” said Wong. “This way they can start snapping up amazing deals for dining and activities for their vacation. We are in the process of expanding to some Asian cities, such as Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei.”

Similar to the competitive group-buying landscape, group-buying aggregators face steep competition from companies who are backed by big money. DailyD, for example, aggregates deals from 53 cities and the company recently raised $5 million in funding.

Deal Page’s Wes Bos says he plans to grow and compete online by focusing on the user-interface and keeping things simple. What the competition is doing, he says, is secondary.

“I am really happy with our layout and user interface, which I’ve heard lots of good feedback about,” Bos said. “When I built the site I had no idea anyone else had one of these sites so I wasn’t influenced by any of them ? I just made a site I would like to see while having my coffee every morning. The sites features are ever evolving based on visitor feedback, so I try and focus less on what competitors are doing and more on what works and makes people happy.”

Bos, who is finishing up his Bachelor of Commerce in Business Technology management at Ryerson University, also maintains a competitive advantage by fostering relationships with owners of group-buying sites in order to make sure he has their sites on Deal Page when they launch.

“We are currently working on some ideas to pull in additional money from sites that want to promote themselves on DealPage,” he said. “It’s a really easy site to convert because people come to the site looking to click.”

[Via Chris Hogg & Digital Journal]

Nielsen admits it miscalculated Web traffic by 22%

One of the top Web traffic data companies in North America has admitted it has been underestimating the amount of time people in the United States spent on the Internet.

The Nielsen Co. says a technical glitch is responsible for its undercounting time spent by 22 percent. Nielsen says the problem stems from its system having difficulty recognizing long URLs.

In a statement obtained by Adage [PDF], Steve Hasker, President of Media Products for Nielsen, said:

We are writing to inform you that we are ctively investigating an erroneous decline in our Internet use data…The primary cause is an increasing incidence of websites using very long URLs that are not properly recognized by our systems. When our system attempts to process session data including the very long URLs, which are more than 2,000 bytes in size each, it intermittently does not recognize the session, causing an estimated average 22% decline in time spent year-over-year, which can vary at the domain level.

The company says there are other factors that led to incorrect data to be shared, but those factors were not disclosed. Nielsen is now looking for potential errors in reports it issued in other countries, as well as reports that track online video consumption and Web search traffic.

Nielsen also said:

This investigation, covering every element of our Internet measurement methodology, including the panel, collection capabilities, and processes, and nature of the root cause indicates that we need to do a better job keeping pace with the rapid evolution of the Internet. We are putting new processes in place to add greater rigor to the continuous testing of our methodology and expanding our monitoring for anomalous events. We have also engaged the Media Rating Council (MRC) to review our findings and the additional processes.

The company says the problem will be fixed by the time its December report is published in January 2011.

[Via Chris Hogg]

Survey: People spend more time using social media than email

By David Silverberg

Web users around the world are spending slightly more time on social media sites compared to email, a new survey from TNS Digital Life found.

In September 2010, surfers spent 4.6 hours a week on social sites and chalked up 4.4 hours on email, eMarketer reports. Other online activities respondents said they did weekly included surfing the Web for “Interest” and “Knowledge” and “News.”

According to the survey, email isn’t going away anytime soon. ”Users are still significantly more likely to send and receive email messages on a daily basis than they are to do any other activity,” eMarketer wrote.

Three-quarters of survey respondents check their inbox every day compared to less than half who go to social media sites with the same frequency.

The TNS survey also provided [PDF] insight into social media usage. Respondents were asked what social media activity they wanted to use more, and 42 percent said they wanted to stream more music and video. The least popular activities to pursue included microblogging and responding to blogs.

eMarketer says more than 61 percent of frequent Internet users globally having a profile on a social network.

TNS says the study is the result of analyzing data from 46 countries in September 2010. A total of 48,804 people aged 16 to 60 years old were interviewed.