A jumble of links and some thoughts

25 February 2011
0 comments

To wrap up this week, here are some interesting links that have been floating around the office, and some of this week's tech news that caught our eye. From the slowly growing relationship between advertising and venture capital to Google's latest ventures, it's all there.

The new innovation model in the advertising industry

There have been some noteworthy things happening in the tech world recently. The first of these is directly related to advertising: Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners have started an investment arm with the sole purpose of “backing early and mid-stage companies that focus on advertising and mobile technologies and design.” The Agency Collaboration blog has sussed out the deal pretty neatly:

By making early stage investments, Kirshenbaum Bond gets access to tremendous market information via “dealflow.” For every investment, the average VC might look at 99 other companies. Those 10 deals might very well represent 1,000 innovative new startups, all of which suddenly have a lot more reason to contact Kirshenbaum Bond than the average creative agency.

Think about that. Will we see more advertising agencies taking to this model as a result? My guess is that we will. It’s a great way for agencies to prove (and simultaneously back) innovation, given that startups (which are usually associated with innovation) and traditional agencies (which are usually not) often operate in completely different ways.

Innovation in journalism gets a push

Google has allocated $2.7 million to the International Press Institute in Vienna as part of their sponsorship for the IPI News Innovation contest. The aim is to encourage new digital journalism initiatives, “including open-source and mobile technology projects created by or for journalists and distributed in the public interest”. Andy and his team’s work on Articlr at the Guardian/Rewired State Hack Day is a good example of an initiative that can improve digital journalism, as are two other apps concepted that weekend: AudioSlideDeck and FluffBox. We’ll certainly be waiting to see what comes out of the IPI contest!

Other interesting links this week

Ashton Kutcher seems to be a serial investor these days: his latest investment being in the data driven search engine for tickets, SeatGeek.

Skype got nearly 30 million people signing in simultaneously to use the service one day this week.

Google is set to launch a YouTube movie streaming service in the UK soon.

Dennis Crowley talks about his plans for FourSquare, which may just may, convince some of us to become FourSquare users again here at Made by Many. That, or SXSW!

Happy weekend!