Microsoft shows off Bing tool for measuring ad effectiveness

Microsoft on Monday demonstrated a new tool for its Bing search engine that will allow advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ads with online users. Mehdi pointed out that statistics show that 39 percent of Web users do 65 percent of the online searches, so it would be beneficial for advertisers to see which of those "heavy users" are targeting certain ads, versus which ads are favored by "light users." The tool Microsoft created shows where the interest in a marketing or advertising campaign is specifically coming from, he said. Speaking at the IAB MIXX Conference and Expo 2009 in New York on Monday, Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Audience Business group, showed off what he called a "user-level targeting" tool that allows Microsoft to see which search-based ads that appear in the Bing search engine are getting the most traffic and from where. "What we're doing with Bing for vigorous measurement is we're matching the exact ad online with the exact user," he said. This measuring ability for Bing was demonstrated as part of Mehdi's presentation, in which he discussed how Microsoft is applying lessons it's learned from studying advertising campaigns and creating technology to reflect that learning.

You have to pick and focus." Microsoft revamped and rebranded its Live Search engine "Bing" in June, and making it more effective for search advertising is something the company continues to work on, Mehdi said. One of those lessons was what he characterized as "relentless measurement and optimization" to find out what ads are most effective so they can be better targeted to their proper audience. "One of the big things is trying to build a loyal fan base for the product," he said. "You can't just go out and put your message everywhere. It was unclear from Mehdi's presentation whether this technology is available for advertisers using Bing today or whether it's just something Microsoft is using internally. This kind of ability to measure what kinds of online advertising is working with users is becoming essential as more and more business is being done on the Web. A representative from Microsoft's public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom, declined to answer follow-up questions about the technology or his presentation.

In fact, Microsoft competitor Adobe Systems - an executive from which spoke before Mehdi on Monday - last week said it was purchasing Web analytics company Omniture to build measuring technology directly into Adobe's tools for creating online media.

Piracy's global economic impact debated

There's no question that software piracy is a global problem with a heavy financial impact. A May 2009 report by the Business Software Alliance and IDC estimated that 20% of software programs installed in the U.S. last year were unauthorized copies. But just how heavy it is is a matter of debate. Worldwide, the figure is 41%, with an estimated financial impact of $53 billion - a figure based on the retail value of the pirated PC software.

If it were, the BSA's global loss figure of $53 billion would drop sharply, they maintain. "Obviously, not every piece of pirated software will be replaced immediately with legitimate software if underlicensing is addressed or sources of pirated stuff dry up," acknowledges Dale Curtis, the BSA's vice president of communications. But critics of the study say it fails to account for the possibility that pirated software could be replaced with Linux or other open-source options. But he says that over the years, IDC has found "a very strong correlation between piracy rates and software sales. One country that wasn't included is Canada - and that doesn't sit right with Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa. "What the BSA did not disclose is that the 2009 report on Canada (whose piracy rate declined from 33% to 32% in the study) were guesses since Canadian firms and users were not surveyed. In country after country, as the piracy rate falls, legitimate sales go up." A second criticism of the report is that its country-by-country figures are partly based on the results of an annual survey that in 2009 covered 24 countries.

While the study makes seemingly authoritative claims about the state of Canadian piracy, the reality is that IDC . . . did not bother to survey in Canada," Geist wrote in a May 27 blog post. Further, he says Canadian users were surveyed the previous year, and "there is no reason to assume large changes in results from one year to the next." Ivan Png, a professor of information systems and economics at the University of Singapore, says the BSA and IDC should explain how they applied the results from the 24 countries surveyed to all of the other countries not surveyed. "IDC should make the methodology transparent," Png says. Curtis responds that the study "is not a guess, nor is it a scientific measurement, nor is it based primarily on a survey of software users, as Geist suggests." A survey of 6,200 users is only a piece of the model, Curtis says.

Windows 7 drives RAM capacity explosion; Vista SP2 usage rising

Windows 7 will drive the average PC RAM capacity to 4GB in the next 18 months. There you'll find a collection of dynamic chart objects that provide a real-time view into data gathered from xpnet.com's nearly 20,000 contributing members. That's the conclusion of researchers at the exo.performance.network who are monitoring the ramp-up to Windows 7's launch on October 22. After evaluating data collected from early adopters of the Windows 7 RTM code spread across several hundred IT sites, the xpnet.com team observed that nearly 50 percent sported memory capacities of 4GB or higher, with some reaching as high as 12GB. The average of all Windows 7 PCs was 3.7GB, which is in stark contrast to Windows XP PCs, where the average RAM capacity (for all versions) hovers at just under 1.7GB. Windows 7 RAM installations also best Vista's average of 2.7GB. In fact, the move from a Vista-centric world to one defined by Windows 7 will likely drive a jump in RAM capacity (by 33 percent) comparable to the one experienced during the transition from Windows XP to Vista (a jump of 37 percent in installed RAM). [ Is your PC ready to run Windows 7? Find out by using InfoWorld's Windows Sentinel tool, which also lets you track performance and other aspects of your Windows PCs and servers. ] Note: You can check out the latest data from the exo.repository by visiting InfoWorld's Windows Pulse page. The bottom line: While much has been made about Windows 7's supposedly reduced memory footprint, the reality is that a combination of Moore's Law (as it applies to RAM density) and the harsh lessons of the Vista debacle are prompting customers to err on the side of caution and equip Windows 7 PCs with ample RAM out of the gate. [ If the charts in this story are not visible, you can see them in the original story at InfoWorld.com. ] Vista SP2 adoption risingThe adoption rate for Windows Vista Service Pack 2 ticked up a bit over the past few weeks.

Meanwhile, the number of systems reporting SP1 installed dropped 2 percentage points (now 72 percent), as did the few laggards still running the Vista RTM release (now at just under 8 percent). Given the breadth of bug fixes and performance enhancements provide by Vista SP2, including improvements to Bluetooth support and an improved wireless networking stack, xpnet.com researchers expect the adoption rate to climb steadily as IT shops finish internal testing and deploy it more widely. After lagging behind Service Pack 1 by a wide margin, SP2 is now gaining momentum, with nearly 20 percent of PCs reporting the newer service pack level. However, they also note that this trend may be tempered somewhat by the conversion of many long-term Vista deployment projects to Windows 7 when it becomes available. This should signal the tipping point for application developers who have been waiting for the technology to reach critical mass before investing in additional multithreading development/multicore tuning for the core product lines. Multicore pushes single-core into the minorityOne development the xpnet.com team has been watching closely is the transition from single- to multicore CPUs. Data from the exo.respository indicates that multicore is now the dominant CPU architecture, with fully 57 percent of the installed base sporting CPUs with two or more cores.

As InfoWorld's tests show, Windows 7 is strongly poised to take advantage of multicore PCs, more so than XP and Vista.

App Store success could change software-buying habits

More than 2 billion applications have been downloaded from Apple Inc.'s App Store, with more than 85,000 apps available to 50 million-plus iPhone and iPod Touch owners worldwide. After the App Store launched on July 11, 2008, it took nine months to hit 1 billion, and only six more months to hit 2 billion, noted Carl Howe, an analyst at Yankee Group Inc. "The more devices that are out there, the more people want to download software, and they see it's an easy and fun experience," Howe said in an interview. The numbers announced by Apple today are staggering to even normally reserved analysts, who noted that after a somewhat slower summer buying rate, App Store downloads globally have exceeded more than 10 million a day in much of September. It also helps that Apple has attracted 125,000 developers to its iPhone Developer Program, he noted.

With the success of the App Store and the growth in other application storefronts backed by BlackBerry, Android and others, "any digital media is fair game," Howe said. After the one-year mark was reached in July, analysts were heralding application stores, including several imitators of the App Store, as the new way to buy software. "You don't have to go to a store to a buy a disc and get the ultimate in instant gratification," Howe said. In fact, while games are a big hit on the App Store, both the free and the paid versions, Apple is calling attention to its "staff picks," which include a free app for the complete works of Shakespeare, with a text-sizing tool. Howe said one of the secrets of the App Store's success is the large number of devices downloading them, but another is the ease with which the apps are downloaded. "If you provide a friction-free way of buying things like App Store, which shortens the time it takes from an impulse to buy to actually buying something, you'll sell a lot," Howe said. "There's not a lot of time for buyer's remorse, and it's a lot like going past a magazine stand in a store and paying $3 for a magazine. In a 28.8 MB app, users get all 40 plays, 154 sonnets and six poems, as well as some works attributed to the Bard, although whether he wrote them remains in doubt. There's not a lot of remorse in buying that item." A Yankee survey of 1,200 U.S. smartphone owners showed that 18% of applications are paid for.

Even the recession has not held back this kind of impulse buying. "The recession doesn't seem to be having an impact. However with growth in the average cost of the paid apps, and the growth in the number of devices, the U.S. revenues from applications will grow by 10 times between 2009 and 2013, reaching $4.2 billion in 2013 . In that survey, more than 70% of all the apps downloaded in the U.S. were games. "It's interesting that you see how the App Store is doing when it was not that long ago - about 2001 when the dotcom bubble burst- that people were saying people would want information to be free on the Internet," Howe noted. These small impulse purchases are kind of recession-proof," Howe said. Enderle said the application store concept might have come along earlier had bricks-and-mortar retailers not objected. "The fact is, that with enough bandwidth, there's very little that can't be delivered over the Web," Enderle said. "We're witnessing what will probably be the end of the traditional software delivery model. Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group, said the two billion mark is "outstanding" given the number of phones available for downloads.

App Store is an indicator that the times they are a changin'."

Microsoft defends its anti-malware software after Symantec piles on

Microsoft is defending the merits of its free Security Essentials anti-malware software after a top Symantec engineer badmouthed the new release. "Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection that uses behavior monitoring and reputation services to help identify the malicious software as soon as it emerges in the ecosystem and then uses the Dynamic Signature Service to make the newest definitions available virtually real-time, without having to wait for the next signature download," Microsoft said in a statement. 11 security companies to watch Earlier in the week, Jens Meggers, vice president of engineering for Norton products, claimed the newly released Security Essentials is just an unimpressive recycling of Microsoft's discontinued Live OneCare technology for Windows desktops. "It's just stripped down OneCare," Meggers said, citing a report from Dennis Technology Lab that compared Norton AntiVirus 2009 to Microsoft Security Essentials and deemed Norton stronger in malware defense by about a 2-to-1 margin (the test was sponsored by Symantec). Microsoft expressed disappointment in Symantec's claims but did not rebut each of Meggers' remarks. In its statement Microsoft said it "continues to advocate for a defense in depth strategy that includes the use of anti-malware software, but also includes protections such as firewall and user account controls like those found in Windows, browser security like that in IE8 and continuous updates like those provided through Microsoft Update." Microsoft indicated it is offering Microsoft Security essentials for free because "we still see far too many consumers worldwide that do not have up-to-date protection either because they cannot afford it, are concerned about the impact the suites will have on the performance of their PCs, or because they simply do not realize their AV software is not up to date." Offering its software for free, said Microsoft, "will remove some of the barriers in the way of consumers having quality anti-malware protection today."