Roundup: Wal-Mart ends Linux experiment, plenty of ad targeting talk, and more

Venture Beat — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:34:55 -0700

Here’s the latest action:
1) Linux falls flat again as Wal-Mart ends experiment
2) Solar panels have a dark side, too
3) Ad targeting moves closer to the public conscious
4) National cable companies want targeting too
5) Attaching numbers to the face of ad targeting
6) Adobe AIR brings Userplane to Macs
7) Calacanis’s tips for saving money in a startup

Linux falls flat with consumers again — Wal-Mart has ended its trial sales of computers running Linux instead of Microsoft Windows, saying that it “wasn’t really what our customers were looking for.” Sales probably wasn’t the problem, as the company’s gPC sold out very quickly according to most reports. Customer service and support probably posed more of a problem.

Solar panels have a dark side, too — Solar may be good at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but actually making the panels could wreak environmental havoc, according to an expose on the Washington Post. This is yet another case of a foreign country polluting itself to sell us popular items — in this case, most of the offending companies are based in China. There’s a bit more concise commentary on Earth2Tech.

Ad targeting moves closer to the public conscious — Advertising mavens are well aware that online ad networks are picking up quite a bit of information about individual surfers as they move around the internet, like location, personal preferences and past actions. That’s generally required for specific targeting, which makes ads more effective and brings in more money. The question so far has been what the public reaction will be to finding out the internet actually does have a good idea of who they are — which just got a little closer to reality, with an article in today’s New York Times that does a pretty good job of explaining targeting for a mass audience. The piece concludes by citing a study showing that 85 percent of Californian adults think that websites should be allowed to track them. The NYT’s Bits blog has a bit more.

National cable companies want targeting too — While we (and the New York Times) are on the subject of targeting, it’s not just happening on the internet. The nation’s largest cable television firms, including Comcast, Cox and Time Warner, are joining up to try to attract more targeted ads for their networks in an initiative called Project Canoe. These kinds of partnerships are becoming more common as old media battles the effect of the internet sucking away ad dollars; last month, it was four major newspaper publishers.

Attaching numbers to the face of targeting — Last privacy-related item, we promise: ComScore came up with an interesting chart showing the number of data points the Googles and Yahoos of the world pull up on you in a month. They don’t just know your zip code, they know it hundreds of times over. See the full chart on ValleyWag.

AIR brings Userplane to Mac desktops — Userplane, the AOL-owned start-up that makes chat and instant messaging tools for web sites, has re-released its Userplane Desktop application on Adobe AIR. Like the avalanche of AIR applications that launched in February (our coverage), Userplane’s new app allows a web site to communicate with your desktop — in this case, by delivering messages from sites in real-time, even when you’re offline. The company previously offered a desktop application, but the AIR release makes it Mac-compatible.

Calacanis’s tips on saving money in a startup — Jason Calacanis has a list of interesting advice he’s accumulated on how to run a startup. He has plenty of unconventional tidbits of wisdom, like “Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs,” and “Buy everyone lunch four days a week.” Make it a four-day work-week, Jason, and I might just apply to Mahalo.