Tag Archive for: Microsoft

News Update – Best of the Day

Just some weeks ago, I have been talking about the idea of replacing loyalty cards by social networking customer service to drive customer engagement. Now, the New York Times has extended the idea by the integration of location-based advertising using Foursquare… and of course replacing loyalty cards by social networks activity and mobile apps. The idea seems to be moving from trend to standard…

Often the question comes up which brands are the most valuable in the world. Millward Brown’s Optimor BrandZ Top100 Most Valuable Global Brands report gives us some insight. The key findings…

– Google is the most valuable global brand worth $114 billion (2nd is IBM with $86 billion, 3rd Apple with $83 billion, Microsoft was fourth with $76 billion.
– Social Media is a winner: Facebook has a brand value of $5.5 billion. Use of social media was a key trend across many of the successful brands this year, i.e. HSBC’s Expat Explorer online community.
– Strong brands such as Samsung (80% growth in brand value) and Starbucks (17% increase) are evidence that businesses with strong brands recover from adversity faster.

Heineken commercials know how to dive into the hearts of their main target group. “Men with talents” is another fantastic example after their “walk in fridge” idea… Sorry ladies, but we man love it!

Study: Permanent change of passwords is a waste of time

The last IT managers and their data and identity security topics were always a challenge for me to find another password instead of ‘iloveyou’ or a mixture of birthday numbers. The question is: Is this permanent change of passwords really as effective as possible and in favor of our security? One thing is for sure, if users have a password manager, they just need to remember one powerful super password.

The Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley now found out that the hype around passwords can be doubted. Herley states that users who ignore security advice are acting rational – and not lazy or stupid. Nevertheless, the study concludes changing passwords constantly is a giant waste of time and money. Plus: It makes the users no safer from identity thieves.

Herley resumes that a task requiring one minute per day from every working adult in the U.S. costs about $15.9 billion per year. Unnecessary security advice “treats as free a resource that is actually worth $2.6 billion an hour.” Does that make sense from a ROI perspective?

The strategy of thieves is not to go for dictionary attacks. These won’t break security. Giving away security credentials through phishing or keylogging is the most effective way. The main issue of the paper is the common requirement that users have to change passwords at specified intervals. Hacker that steal your password will be using it straight away – waiting is nt his tactic.

“Insisting that users choose a unique strong password for each (account) which they change often and never write down is clearly a large burden.”

Spot On!
How do you see this study? Is the mega password with the password manager he best option for security?

News Update – Best of the Day

Although a study shows that 36% of internet searches lead to negative results, Microsoft and Google are still fighting their virtual competition for the best search engine – Bing vs. Google. Now, an eye-tracking study by User Centric offer a first look in the success of both. In sponsored links Bing performed better…

“However, sponsored links… attracted more attention on Bing (~42% of participants per search) than they did on Google (~25% of participants per search).”

Social media enters school education in America. Xavier Lur gives some interesting insight in the learning options of YouTube, Twitter or Facebook. And he links to 25 cases to use Twitter in the Classroom…

What will Bloomberg’s digital future and expansion strategy be looking like? Andrew Lack, CEO of Bloomberg’s new Multimedia Group, says that it will rely on original video news content to mobile phone users around the world. Watch his words at the Advertising 2.0 conference…

News Update – Best of the Day

According to a Microsoft research the time peole are online in Europe will be more than the length of time they spend watching TV – and this will already be the case in June 2010. The outlook of the software giant predicts that people will spend on average 14.2 hours a week online and 11.5 hours a week watching TV.

Although YouTube is ot the easiest site for Google to bring to advertisers minds, it still does some good results – and has increased ad selling from 6 to 9% – in terms of its video views. Nevertheless, revenues are still low – as for all competiors like Hulu or MySpace, said AdAge. Again it shows, content is king from revenue perspectives…

“The gain in YouTube’s U.S. business is the result of a number of factors, including more content agreements with partners such as CBS, MGM and, more recently, Disney, expanding YouTube’s partner program to thousands of indie and small producers and successfully guiding YouTube visitors to content it can sell to advertisers.”

Some fashion spots are just cool… and find a great ending.

News Update – Best of the Day

– Die Diskussion um Portable Social Graphs geht weiter. Razorfish zeigt eine gute Präsentation hierzu und verschweigt auch nicht die Risiken…

– Microsoft holt den Ex-Chef von Yahoo und macht ihn zum ‘Internet Unit Chef’: Qi Lu. Er wird die freie Position im Unternehen füllen, die seit Juli Kevin Johnson aufgemacht hat – nachdem er den gescheiterten Versuch, Yahoo zu kaufen, Mitte des Jahres mitverantwortet.

– Chris Brogan hat mal wieder eine Liste gemacht: die 40 Wege, den ultimative Blog-Content zu bringen. Unternehmen, die bloggen, es sich überlegt oder noch nicht sicher sind… – einfach lesen.