Veeple video-inserted ads
So, how much did Google pay for YouTube? $1.65 billion. And how much revenue comes in from all those YouTube videos? Um, it’s pretty safe to assume no numbers starting with a “b.” Plus, all those videos don’t have an ounce of interactivity within their digital bits. So how do companies capitalize on the video craze? Companies like Hulu have experimented with pre-roll ads with some success, but online advertisers need a better way of turning the passive video-watching experience into a possible revenue giant for brands.

Enter Veeple. The company claims its new technology allows users to imbed any type of content into static videos, spicing them up with text overlays, captions, thought bubbles, and, most importantly for advertisers, web links. These “spots,” as the company refers to them, are simply dropped on top of a video, and can even follow an element — like a person, a poster, a DVD — in the video if it moves.

“The idea of pop-up ads, and banner ads and pre-rolls, where all the money is being spent today, is not where all the money will be spent tomorrow,” Veeple CEO and co-founder Scott Bloomberg said. “The in-stream model, over time, will be the more interesting one for advertisers.”

Veeple just launched version 2 of its software platform at TechCrunch50, adding a number of new features, and it should be available commercially soon. Developers can program in “one-click, two-click” interfaces, bringing up info screens on the video before clicking off to the next website, and even send content to mobile devices.

Any sort of logo or link (like all the social networks) can be embedded, as can audio and separate video files. The service will also include a pencil tool, allowing developers to sketch a transparent spot of any size and shape. As for performance tracking, Veeple is launching its analytics service, giving advertisers all the expected stats, including which spots are performing well and which aren’t.

In the demo I saw, the process looked simple: upload a video onto their site, and then start adding the spots. In a way, it feels like a social application — a way of personalizing videos like the old “pop-up video” of our VH1 past.

The question is whether users will respond to spots in the way they responded to pop-up ads. But overall, Veeple has the potential to create a more seamless watching experience for online videos than with pre-roll ads, while producing more possibilities for advertisers.Super banner ads from Analog Analytics
As Sean X Cummings so frequently reminds us, consumers — you, me and everyone else — pretty much feel unambiguous hatred toward banner ads. Not quite reaching the level of loathing reserved for pop-up ads and, ahem, Windows Vista, banner ads are one of the scourges of browsing, prompting many users to go to great lengths to block them.

So, how do we make the banner ad effective again? Advertisers have been experimenting plenty over the last few years, and the folks at Analog Analytics feel they’ve struck some sort of gold with their Super Banner Ads, which combine interactive marketing with direct response, offering users an immediate value when they engage the banner.

“The Super Banner Ad is a traditional banner, but we attached a coupon or promotional offer to it,” Ken Kalb, CEO and president of Analog Analytics, said, adding that the real key to these banners is their dynamic functions. “We figured out how to combine an offering that would change rapidly over time as a function of the conversion rate.”

Coming in two flavors — coupon for retail and coupon for call centers — these banners ask users to input their information, including name, email and telephone, and then immediately delivers an e-coupon to that mobile device that users can redeem at a nearby retail store.

But if users aren’t reacting to the banner along set goals, advertisers can have the coupon automatically increase (or decrease) along preset levels of value. Say you’re advertising flowers before Mother’s Day and offering a $10 off coupon. Nobody’s is going for it, so the banners automatically add free shipping, without changing the creative element of the ad. Suddenly your conversion rate jumps. Mothers get flowers. Your brand smiles. That’s the idea, at least.

The second part of the Super Banner Ad is to bridge people with the analog world, instantaneously connecting them to a call center. While not necessary for all brands (“Hello, this is Coke.” “Good… And how are you today?”), a travel company or a pizza brand might find this very useful in converting that coupon into a real-world sale.

When I tried their demo, it was quick, taking about 10 seconds to get the text; it comes in standard text message, but the company will also allow email coupons. No clipping, no scissors, no paper waste — just an immediate return of monetary value. As an easy way of giving users value, the Super Banner Ads have a lot of potential, if they can get people to stop ignoring banners in general.

Now, getting the 7/11 guy to believe I actually have a coupon on my phone — that’s a whole different story.1020 Placecast’s geo-targeting ad network
We can safety rely on the fact that position-target advertising on mobile devices is a big part of the future. As unsettling as this prospect is to Big Brother-fearing types, these GPS-laden devices open up huge new opportunities for advertisers and, according to a few online creative marketing pros I spoke with, everyone is now looking to include the ultimate iPhone app as a part of their new advertising platform.

It makes sense, of course. Brands want their products to reach out to the people most likely to use them, and those people just might be the consumers walking down the street right now.

Lo and behold, 1020 Placecast is here — a geo-targeting ad network that just inked an agreement with online events tracker Eventful to deliver location-based ads to the iPhone.

The clever idea is this: A young consumer, 18-35, is driving down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and she checks her iPhone for nearby concerts using, say, Eventful. She not only sees that Death Cab for Cutie is playing down the street at the Viper Room but also sees an ad for a nearby Burger King where she can grab a bite to eat beforehand. That ad, delivered by 1020 Placecast, may not yet consider her dietary habits (she’s clearly vegan) in its geographically targeted advertising (just give them time), yet the customer has just received relevant advertising while on the road from information provided by the GPS chip in her phone. That’s pretty cool.

“People have been talking about location-based advertising for years, and we are the first ones to be capable of actually doing it,” Anne Bezancon, founder and president of 1020 Placecast, said at the product’s launch at ad:tech in May. She assures users, however, that this won’t be a hit against privacy. “We do not need any personally identifiable information to target our ads based on place.”

Not reserved for mobile devices like the iPhone, the ad network also operates over broadband and Wi-Fi. To deliver its ads, the company defines “place” as more than just location, taking into account things like store locations, time of day, and demographic information. It culls location information from service providers, consumer-entered data, GPS, Wi-Fi hotspot locations and cell ID.

This is all a little experimental still, but the idea of getting useful ads on a mobile device rather than just more spam is an intriguing one, for both advertisers and consumers. With a good iPhone partner like Eventful, 1020 Placecast has a chance to establish a formidable footprint on this new online advertising space.

One week ago I had 2 mbps and IE 7.0 and now on I have 100 Mbps and google chrome. That means now I am flying….

About noon Pacific, the download site for Google’s new open-source browser, Chrome, will go live. In a press conference held today at the Google headquarters, some of the Chrome team went through what makes Chrome new and different. While we’ll have a hand-on as soon as possible, here’s a quick rundown of what makes Chrome special.

Update 12:11 PM PDT: The installer is about 7 Mbytes, according to Google.

Tabs:: First and foremost, the team said that they wanted to make tabs special. Firefox and Opera introduced this concept to the world, and they’re now part of everyday browsing life. In Chrome, tabs are objects; they can be dragged and reorganized, split off into separate windows, and then rejoined. Even better, if one tab crashes, the other don’t. Chrome is a multiprocess rendering engine, so if one tab dies, the others don’t. And the browser doesn’t die, either. It’s even better with a dual-core CPU.

Security: And it has security implications, too: normally processes on the desktop can mess with your files. But to render Web pages, you don’t need those processes. Google calls this technology the “Sandbox”. Google also will make the browser’s “task manager” transparent to the user, so you can see if a Flash process, for example, is monopolizing your browser. And if a tab dies, it can be restored.

The “Omnibox”: A browser without a Google search box? Yes. Like the Mozilla “Awesomebar,” the address box can be used as the search box, too. But that’s not all. Chrome includes a feature that “knows” what you’re looking for: type “a”, for example, and if you’re a frequent Amazon user, the bar will auto-suggest “amazon.com” — a feature that has been in the Google search box for some time. But if you use Amazon’s own on-page search engine, for example, Chrome can sniff that too, and will offer you the option to use that directly in future searches. But, if you already have a preference to use IE or Yahoo’s search, Chrome will recognize that and build that in. There are no intrinsic ties to Google services, according to Google executives — probably a dodge against an antitrust investigation.

Tabs as apps: For some windows, such as Gmail, users don’t often move away from the page. In this case, there’s a special option to “save” the application as a desktop shortcut. When it’s opened, the browser will eliminate the search/address box.

“Incognito window”: Want to search for a new job? A racy novel? An “incognito window” not only offers the same safety features as the other tabs, but it also prevents any sort of cookies or Web history from being stored on the browser. Internet Explorer 8 also offers a similar technology.

Transparent downloads: This looks like a bit like a Mozilla plugin called Download Statusbar. Downloading a file prompts a little arrow pointing down to a notification bar that is created at the bottom of the screen, where you can select how to handle the file: save it, run it, etc.

Performance: Google executives showed off a test that rendered many typical We pages about three times faster than Internet Explorer. But tests will have to confirm this. Google’s Chrome uses the Webkit rendering engine used in Safari, and a custom “V8″ Javascript rendering engine.