Digital Rights, anyone?

In a recent post by Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch.com, it is interesting to note that despite the pervasiveness of online lifestyle that we enjoy now, there are concerns which we need to look deeper at, such as...

"The Right to Use and Reuse Content: Consumers know that digital copies of songs, words, and videos are qualitatively different than physical copies, yet copyright law treats them the same way. When the economics of scarcity no longer apply, consumers start to behave differently. They copy and reuse content in unforeseen ways. The pendulum has swung so far that normal consumer behavior has now been criminalized. The concept of fair use needs to be updated and clarified, while still balancing the fundamental right of copyright holders to profit from their creations.

The Right To Control Digital Property On Your Own Device: Possession may be nine tenths of the law, but digital devices don’t follow that rule. When it comes to digital property, who owns what is ill-defined. This can become especially complicated when content is tied to a specific device. If I download a digital book to my Kindle or an app to my iPhone, Amazon or Apple (to pick on them again) have the ability to pull any content from my device without notice or permission. Even if I’ve paid for the content in question. Copyright law and DRM technologies are so intertwined and confused that both consumers and companies could benefit from clearer rules of the road.

The Right To The Free Flow Of Information: Internet service providers, especially those who benefit from public rights of way, should not be allowed to discriminate against information by data type. Debates about Net Neutrality can get bogged down in discussions about content filtering, packet prioritization, and backbone peering rules. But the issue here is basic access to the Internet and all the data that it contains. Data is information and artificial limits on what kinds of data can flow through the Internet’s pipes can amount to a form of censorship.

The Right To (Some) Privacy: For the most part, the expectation of privacy is dead on the Web. But the privacy of certain types of information (health, financial) will always need to be protected. Federal guidelines for how to protect consumer data is preferable to a hodgepodge of industry and state regulations that are currently failing us. (Who wants to book a room at the Best Western?) Privacy laws are also inconsistent in the physical and digital worlds. The Bork law, for instance, makes it illegal for physical video stores to share my rental records, but iTunes or Amazon could sell my digital video or music purchases without running afoul of the law.

The Right to Control Your Digital Identity: And what happens when the “content” in question is your own digital identity. Who owns that? The answer should be that you do. Congress is certainly interested in this issue, and wants to make sure that online advertising networks don’t abuse their possession of your identity data to bombard you with ads. In fact, Google and Yahoo, have been making preemptive moves in an attempt to stave off regulation. But politicians may want to take a closer look at the EU’s privacy directive, which has been in effect for more than decade. Citizens should be able certify that the digital identity associated with their name in a given database is in fact theirs and to revoke access to that identity information on a case-by-case basis."

Will this be possible in the Philippines? If our legislation was able to make E-Commerce Bill into a law, why not something like this. Of course, with the proliferation of the many so-called "scandals" I believe that this will be helpful to provide more protection to our online life.

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Big Leap in our Elections

According to the Commission on Elections recent announcement and I quote,

"As of August 12, sixty percent (60%) of 5170 precincts in the entire Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) has already transmitted results of the elections.

For Maguindanao, 95.2% of the total number of precincts has already transmitted poll results. It was followed by Shariff Kabunsuan with 91.01% and Basilan, 69.53%. The other provinces have slower transmission namely Lanao del Sur (52.67%), Tawi-Tawi, (39%) and Sulu with 27.07%.

Vince Dizon, Spokesperson of Smartmatic-Sahi added that we are almost complete with the transmission of the elections results from Maguindanao. Transmission in 17 municipalities has already been 100% completed while the rest have already reached the 95% level. The speed has accelerated significantly after a few hours after the closing of the polls.

Definitely, there are still many areas where we can improve the automated system as we prepare for the 2010 elections."

This, despite the on-going conflict in nearby areas in Mindanao, we can now look forward that the 2010 elections will have a major improvement than our previous elections. That instead of waiting for the result for months, we can hopefully expect the results much faster.

Whether the cha-cha will push through or not, I believe that the computerization will help us to lessen the frauds and other malpractices.

More importantly, like all Filipinos, we need to be vigilant as this 2010 election will be critical if any form of our government will be successful or not.

reference: http://www.comelec.gov.ph/

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On Online Ads

Last August 19, 2008, Josh Chasin of comScore.com, amplified the impact of online advertising these days and I quote:

"Online display advertising works. At my company, we have done hundreds of studies demonstrating the ROI of different kinds of online advertising. In one case study recently presented, we found that, among consumers exposed to a campaign, click-through accounted for only 10% of subsequent site visits and 14% of incremental dollar sales volume; view-through — consumers exposed to the campaign but who did not click on the ads — accounted for 90% of eventual site visits and 86% of incremental dollar sales. In other words, gauging the effectiveness of this campaign based solely on clicks would have missed 90% of the sales impact.

Online advertising drives offline sales. Sometimes people forget that the Internet is not a self-contained ecosystem. We can’t ignore the extent to which online advertising can drive offline sales, something else that can’t be counted with clicks. Using our panel and our ability to link it to offline databases, we have been able, time and again, to quantify the impact of online advertising on offline sales. Even for search advertising, wherein one might be tempted to believe the majority of effectiveness accrues in-session and via click, we have observed that 83% of the advertising impact on sales is either latent (sales on subsequent user sessions; 20%) or offline (63%.)

Search and display work better together. Another thing we’ve found is that when an advertiser runs a search and a display campaign simultaneously, the impact (as measured by lift versus a control group) of exposure to both search and display is greater than the impact of search alone or of display alone; in fact, impact of search and display together exceeds the sum of the effects of search and display impact individually. In other words, there is a synergistic effect; add two and two and you get five. And not surprisingly, much of the incremental sales generated by the combined exposure group occurs offline.

Display ads online are at least as valuable as display ads offline. Television still commands a significantly greater share of ad dollars than the Internet, at higher CPMs. In my last column, I noted that online ads that can be empirically tied to conversion tend to have greater perceived value than ads whose primary impact is measured by awareness, recall and other brand-building metrics. So let me make this point: the impression generated by one consumer watching a given spot presented within long form online video, in full screen mode, is at least as valuable as an impression delivering the same spot to the same consumer on traditional TV. (I would argue that the online impression is probably more valuable because it is likely to also reach the kind of younger, more tech-savvy and harder-to-reach consumer that is increasingly difficult for traditional TV to deliver.)

As we develop new ways to dedicate on-screen real estate to delivering captivating, engaging ads, whether via banner, rich media or emerging formats, I fully expect online display advertising to become an increasingly important component of the media mix. We don’t require a click-through from a magazine ad or a TV ad or a newspaper ad or a radio ad, and all these impressions are valued by advertisers. Impressions online should have at least the same value, wholly independent of the direct linkage to a click. The opportunity to generate that action online is a profound value-add, but let’s make sure that we properly value the ad before we overlay the value-add. Advertising can have immediate effect, but it can also have quantifiable mid-term effect, and profoundly valuable long-term branding effect. And that is as true for online advertising as for any other medium."

Though as indicated by yugatech.com in his recent post, online ads here in the Philippines is still in its infancy and only the biggest names such as inquirer.net got the biggest chunks of this revenue.

I just hope that as more and more bloggers come to mature and gain prominence, our local companies will look into this as a medium to reach more tech-savvy customers.

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Innovation According to Sir Kawasaki

This is a very interesting topic about innovation, according to Sir Guy Kawasaki who is a VC based in California and has the following ventures: Nononina and Garage Technology Ventures.

Just take note that this is almost an hour presentation, but is a worthwhile topic!

Please check out on his site, http://www.guykawasaki.com/, and definitely, you will learn a lot from the Guy!

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