Delvinia Link Pool

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Eric Schmidt not a Fan of Facebook Ads

Last week, outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt dismissed the idea of Facebook as Google's main competitor, claiming that Facebook ads don't really displace search ads.

A Webtrends study of Facebook advertising explains at least one reason why Schmidt may be right: users burn out much faster on Facebook ads than they do on search ads.

The study looked at about 1,500 Facebook ad campaigns consisting of more than 11,000 ads, and found that average clickthrough rates decline by half in about two days. In other words, once a user has seen an ad a couple of times, they're very unlikely to click on it. The pattern of decay continues until the clickthrough rate gets so low that Facebook removes it, and the advertiser is forced to start over again.

via businessinsider.com

Ins and Outs of Internet Calling - NYTimes.com

The world of phone calls is changing fast. Any time some service is both essential and expensive — like phone service — you can bet that somebody will invent less expensive alternatives.

As faster Internet connections caught on, it didn’t take long for clever programmers to realize that the Internet could transmit voices.

The world was suddenly full of programs (Skype, iChat, Google Talk, various Messenger programs) that let you make free “phone calls” to anywhere, as long as you and your callee were both sitting at computers.

via nytimes.com

Facebook rolls out 'Deals' service to the UK (Wired UK)

Facebook rolls out 'Deals' service to the UK
via wired.co.uk

At an event in London, Facebook has rolled its "Deals" service out to the UK and four other European countries, allowing users to get discounts for checking into places. The Groupon-like service, which launched in the United States on 3 November, 2010, allows retailers to see when someone checks in to their store or restaurant, and potentially offer them a discount code. As most check-ins happen through the mobile phone, the service primarily revolves around Facebook's mobile app.

ESPN Relaunches Radio App

Fox has the rights to the Super Bowl this Sunday, but every other media outlet in the free world will take full advantage of the game up until kick off. Here, for instance, is an app launch from ESPN — not a new app,, but a refresh of its Radio app at Apple’s iTunes store, featuring all sorts of personalization bells and whistles.

Most impressive: Searchable audio that lets you sift through all of the network’s daily audio output to find mentions of your favorite teams, players, etc. So you can leave work, head to the gym and download, um, all of the day’s Clay Matthews news, without having to waste time Web surfing through the day. (Yes, you’re going to Web surf, anyway).

The Disney-owned sports network isn’t changing the app’s price, which will stick at $2.99. ESPN says it has sold “hundreds of thousands” of the app since it launched in September 2009. 1-800-FLOWERS.com has signed on as the exclusive sponsor for the relaunch.

via mediamemo.allthingsd.com

Real World Mapping with the Kinect « Decorator Pattern (Martin Szarski's Blog)

Real World Mapping with the Kinect

January 23, 2011 Martin Szarski Leave a comment Go to comments

Many people have experimented with using the Kinect for more than just user interaction. One thing that I have been very interested in is extracting point clouds from the device.

People at the ROS (ros.org) project have gone to some trouble to determine empirical calibration parameters for the depth camera (disparity to real-world depth) here, and Nicolas Burrus has posted parameters for the RGB camera (relationship between the depth image and the RGB image) here.

Putting those together, one can take the depth image from the Kinect and turn it in to a metric point cloud with real distances. Then, those points can be projected back to the RGB camera centre to determine which RGB pixel corresponds to each depth point, and hence arrive a colour for each point in the cloud. This lets the surfaces captured in the image appear textured. With a bit of coding I came up with this:

via blog.decoratorpattern.com