Last week, Burt appeared in front of the crowd at DEMO (“The Launchpad for Emerging Technology”) to pitch/launch their latest invention Rich. Rich is the world’s first campaign analytics tool, built with creative agencies in mind. Rich helps to answer critical questions (or what should be considered critical) such as “was the ad visible?”, “how long was it visible?”, and “did people notice it?”. In other words, Rich goes a few steps beyond CTR (click-through rate) and reach.

About Burt

We make software for the advertising industry. We founded Burt to give people a better understanding how the online media works, and enable more clever, entertaining and persuasive campaigns.

Video from Burt’s blog Be the Meme. Rich logo from Burtcorp.com.

Personal top 10 stats from the video (all statistics and sources found at the official site):

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers… 96% of them have joined a social network.
• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.
• Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years). Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months… iPhone applications hit 1 billion downloads in 9 months.
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia.
• % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees… 80%.
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama.
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily.
• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook… daily.

Via Beta Alfa and Mashable. Full statistics from the video available over at Socialnomics.net.

I just watched the beautiful “HOME” documentary by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. It has +1M views on YouTube after about a month. I’d warmly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. A bit “propagandic” in an Inconvenient Truth way, but hey – it’s only the truth this time around too. Some key takeaways:

• 20% of the world’s population consumes 80% of its resources
• The world spends 12 times more on military expenditures than on aid to developing countries
• 5,000 people a day die because of dirty drinking water. 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water
• Nearly 1 billion people are going hungry
• Over 50% of grain traded around the world is used for animal feed or biofuels
• 40% of arable land has suffered long-term damage
• Every year, 13 millions hectares of forest disappear
• One mammal in 4, one bird in 8, one amphibian in 3 are threatened with extinction. Species are dying at a rhythm 1,000 times faster than the natural rate
• Three quarters of fishing grounds are exhausted, depleted or in dangerous decline
• The average temperature of the last 15 years have been the highest ever recorded
• The ice cap is 40% thinner than 40 years ago
• There may be at least 200 million climate refugees by 2050

Scary.

After being up a day or two, Microsoft launched their first Bing ad push a couple of hours ago.

“For decisions that matter, Bing & decide”

This slogan and video is part of the $100M that Microsoft reportedly are willing to spend on the Bing promotion, good or bad? I took this video from the Bing YouTube channel, is it comedy (or clever) that they’re utilizing a Google-property to reach critical mass among users?

I’m still torn about the name (to put it polite), the reasoning behind the name is of course that it’s easy to “verb up“, while evangelizing the phrase “Bing me” or “Bing it” as reported by Wired. Another comment about the name that Steve Ballmer has made is “We [Microsoft] just wanted something that “unambiguously says ‘search.’” — yeah, about that Steve – I’m not so sure about that one. It’s going to be really interesting to see how it performs over the next few weeks though.

One thing is certain though, Oscar Karlsten the chess player, who started playing Chess for Boden’s Chess Club in 1928 is way more popular over at Bing than on Google. Dammit!