A few quick interesting links:
A good friend of mine just posted a study on the impact of social media on generating actual leads vs. search on the Hubspot blog. In a not surprising conclusion, social media traffic had a much better conversion of traffic to leads (i.e. was higher yielding) than search traffic. I guess this makes sense, because if someone is engaged enough to connect with you via social media then they are probably a better potential customer.
Congratulations to DataXu, and Atlas Venture portfolio company, for formally launching its service. DataXu is a bidding platform for online display advertising and has a solid team from MIT and is headed by Mike Baker, and experienced online advertising executive. Good luck to them as they grow the business! I like the company because I believe that there is a funny power dynamic in the online advertising world - powerful ad sellers like Google also are the major suppliers of ad optimization technology to the ad buyers. So, basically the people who sell you the ad also provide you with the tool to decide if you want to buy the ad. This may or may not be a real conflict of interest, but it is strange. I always imagine the analogy of the car dealer also being the one publishing Consumer Reports. A player like DataXu should help ad buyers become more sophisticated and control their own data.
Finally,
Intuit has agreed to buy Mint.com. This is pretty cool! I believe (or hope at least) that this shows that consumers are moving aggressively to embrace the power of the internet to manage important aspects of their financial life. The thing I always thought was smart about Mint was that it required zero work - you input your account numbers and passwords and the engine does the rest. Pretty slick. Has anyone defined Web 3.o yet? If Web 2.0 was social media/having your friends and others create the content for you, is Web 3.0 automatically surrendering up lots of personal information and letting the web/AI make sense of it all?
