CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

User-Generated Data Network Effects and Market Competition Dynamics

This Article defines User-Generated Data (“UGD”) network effects, distinguishes them from the more familiar concept of traditional network effects, and explores their implications for market competition dynamics. It explains that UGD network effects produce various efficiencies for digital service providers (“data platforms”) by empowering their services’ optimization, personalization, and continuous diversification. In light of these efficiencies, competition dynamics in UGD-driven markets tend to be unstable and lead to the formation of dominant multi-industry conglomerates. These processes will enhance social welfare because they are natural and efficient. Conversely, countervailing UGD network effects also empower data platforms to detect and neutralize competitive threats, price discriminate among users, and manipulate users’ behaviors. The realization of these effects will result in inefficiencies, which will undermine social welfare. After a comprehensive analysis of conflicting economic forces, this Article sets the ground for informed policymaking. It suggests that emerging calls to aggravate antitrust enforcement and to “break up” Big Tech are ill-advised. Instead, this Article calls for policymakers to draw inspiration from traditional network industries’ public utility and open-access regulations

Guide to Advertising Technology

Advertising technology has built a massive technical infrastructure. The technology and motivations of advertising undergird the economy of the internet. News sites are no exception. The information we seek about our world is underpinned with, and shaped by, advertising and its needs. Journalists need to know more about these technologies, how they work, and how they influence the practice, distribution, and perception of journalism. Advertising technology may threaten the reputation and economic viability of news publishers in various ways. Ad tech promotes a specific type of audience engagement, and its incentive structures have been shown to alter how news gets produced, potentially undermining readers’ trust in publishers to provide objective coverage. Ad tech’s push of user data through opaque systems, and in some cases deposit malware onto readers’ devices, threatens reader privacy and safety and can further damage publishers’ reputations. The slow load times and distracting user experience of display ads can hamper the performance of news websites and drive readers towards walled information gardens like private apps and social-media platforms. This may siphon audiences away from professional journalism outlets and may render them more vulnerable to manipulative information operations, patterns which academics and policy-makers are only beginning to under- stand. Policies around advertising on social platforms threaten to blur the line between news and political messaging, and may incentivize so-called “influencers” to bypass publishers entirely and create their own content. Search-engine companies, meanwhile, have been accused of exploiting their power over how users find and access information. In producing this report we were driven by a set of questions, including: What’s the relationship between news publishers and advertisers? What’s changing? What’s contested? And how does the contemporary arrangement of advertising, writers, readers, and devices influence the news

Facebook’s Anticompetitive Lean in Strategies

Facebook is under fire on several fronts and with good reason. Regulators strive to make sense of and address a plethora of seemingly unrelated issues that arise from the operation of its platform. These range from antitrust, privacy violations, dissemination of harmful content and speech, deception and polarisation to political manipulation. This paper identifies Facebook’s unrestricted and excessive data collection as a unifying theme that requires immediate antitrust action. Once a privacy-oriented social network, Facebook soon mutated into a surveillance machine designed to hoover people’s personal data to identify and understand people’s interests, preferences and emotions and turn that knowledge into profit through the sale of targeted ads. Since people’s innate preference for privacy stood in the way of Facebook’s growth, Facebook resorted to privacy intrusions and deception to access as much user data as possible, thereby gaining market power. Currently, its overwhelming dominant position in the social media market means that no matter how much data Facebook extracts from users, how transparent its information about its data processing practices is and how many privacy scandals ensue from its reckless handling of data, users have nowhere else to go. This paper provides a course of action to correct this unacceptable anticompetitive outcome. The imposition of unfair commercial terms on consumers, the distortion of the competitive process through privacy violations and misleading practices, the squeezing of news publishers’ traffic and foreclosure of actual and potential competitors by Facebook, can be stopped. A combination of data and consumer protection measures alone cannot stop Facebook’s actions, but antitrust enforcement can be used to curb Facebook’s ability to reinforce its data-driven abuse of its market power

Selling The American People: Data, Technology, And The Calculated Transformation Of Advertising

This dissertation tells the history of a future imagined by advertisers as they interpreted and constructed the affordances of digital information technologies. It looks at how related efforts to predict and influence consumer habits and to package and sell audience attention helped orchestrate the marriage of behavioral science and big-data analytics that defines digital marketing today. My research shows how advertising and commercial media industries rebuilt their information infrastructures around electronic data processing, networked computing, and elaborate forms of quantitative analysis, beginning in the 1950s. Advertisers, agencies, and media companies accommodated their activities to increasingly calculated ways of thinking about consumers and audiences, and to more statistical and computational forms of judgement. Responding to existing priorities and challenges, and to perceived opportunities to move closer to underlying ambitions, a variety of actors envisioned the future of marketing and media through a set of possibilities that became central to the commercialization of digital communications. People involved in the television business today use the term “advanced advertising” to describe a set of abilities at the heart of internet and mobile marketing: programmability (automation), addressability (personalization), shoppability (interactive commerce), and accountability (measurement and analytics). In contrast to the perception that these are unique elements of a “new” digital media environment that emerged in the mid-1990s, I find that these themes appear conspicuously in designs for using and shaping information technologies over the course of the past six decades. I use these potential abilities as entry points for analyzing a broader shift in advertising and commercial media that began well before the popular arrival of the internet. Across the second half of the twentieth century, the advertising industry, a major cultural and economic institution, was reconstructed around the goal of expanding its abilities to account for and calculate more of social and personal life. This transformation sits at an intersection where the processing of data, the processing of commerce, and the processing of culture collide

It’s Just Muzak: Music, Activism, and Advertising.

This thesis builds on recent scholarship explaining the relationships between music, advertising, and society through a series of focused case studies in the clothing industry. Globally ubiquitous and reaching all socioeconomic strata, the fashion industry offers a useful focus because, in addition products, it also sells identity. Fashion is a means for individuals to create and express identity by associating themselves with certain brands and styles that help express social, political, economic, and ethical standings as well as gender, sexuality, race, and religion. This thesis considers the ways that sound and music influence the aesthetic and mood of recent fashion industry commercials. Focusing mainly on North American commercials and video advertisements (including those airing on television and across internet streaming services), it explores the various methods and approaches to contemporary commercial music that the fashion industry uses to craft careful messages about environmental sustainability, social power dynamics, and contemporary politics, explaining the ways that these issues are linked. Eschewing an Adornian critique of the culture industry and instead considering all music and sound to be important, regardless of how utilitarian or commodified it may appear to be, this thesis suggests that music plays a key role in linking social issues to music in fashion industry commercials

Healthy Food Portal Business Plan and Its Function Model

Business planning is a tool of paramount importance in the process of company management, on the efficiency of which the future functioning of the enterprise depends. Formation of a business plan enables the team to productively and competently use existing funds and resources in their work and apply planning as a very effective management mechanism (Hamm, 2016). The goal of this final project is to develop a business plan for a healthy nutrition portal for Bellyful LLC. Bellyful is based in Boston, USA, and the portal will be its first product. Our client is interested in researching the prospects of launching a new project and planning activities for the implementation of development and promotion. But he was faced with the problem that he could not independently correctly and efficiently develop a business plan for the project. This problem was identified by the client during an interview with him. We chose interviews, brainstorming, content analysis, desk methods (Internet sources, literary sources, articles, media), analysis of competitors, analysis of marketing research as the main methods of collecting information. The object of this project is the portal of healthy nutrition of the company “Bellyful”. The subject of this project is a business plan for a healthy nutrition portal of the company “Bellyful”. Also, during the interview, we were assigned tasks that are required to achieve the goal and solve the problem: develop all sections of the business plan; provide a set of recommendations based on the results of the research that will help the client understand what to focus on during implementation. Based on the interview, during the initial search and analysis of literature and information sources on the research topic, this list of tasks was expanded and clarified: analyze the theoretical foundations and trends of business planning; determine methods of data collection and analysis, possible ethical problems of the project; to give a general description of the project for the development of the portal; research the healthy nutrition market; draw up a marketing plan for the project, taking into account its target audience; draw up an organizational plan for the project; draw up a production plan of the project; assess the potential risks of the project; draw up a financial plan for the project; elaborate the recommendations. To solve these problems, we carefully read the educational and methodologicalliterature on planning a new business, revealed the concept of business planning, the structure of a business plan, considered the main indicators of project performance, studied the trends observed in business planning. After that, we proceeded directly to the description of all sections of the business plan. During this part of our project, we used various methods of analyzing and researching the collected data and distributed them to the points of the business plan. So, we studied in depth the field of healthy nutrition, identified the actual creation of a portal for healthy nutrition, identified the main competitors. After identifying the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, we were able to determine the functionality of the portal which will be in demand among consumers. Also, we developed a marketing strategy, taking into account the target audience of the new business. An important point of our research was the preparation of a financial plan for the project, which will help us determine the estimated costs and profits of the enterprise. Calculation of project performance indicators helped us prove that the nutrition portal is a project worthy of the investment. In addition, we studied all possible project risks and developed measures to prevent their occurrence. The final result of the work, in addition to a full-fledged business plan, is a list of recommendations for the implementation of a business plan and project development for the client. As one of the recommendations, we suggested the development of portal prototypes. In the modern world, this is a necessary condition for the high-quality development of an information product. Our team has developed a functional model of a healthy nutrition portal for our client. The results of the work can be used in practice when developing a portal for healthy nutrition

A taxonomy and business analysis for mobile web applications

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-115).Mobile web applications refer to web applications on mobile devices, aimed at personalizing, integrating, and discovering mobile contents in user contexts. This thesis presents a comprehensive study of mobile web applications by proposing a new taxonomy for mobile web applications, and conducting a business analysis in the field of mobile web applications. The thesis reviews the current surrounding environment for mobile web applications, namely, web 2.0 and 3.0, wireless communication technology, and Smartphone platform. The recent entry and success of Apple's iPhone greatly enhanced the public awareness of the Smartphone technology. Google's release of open-source Android platform and T-Mobile's deployment of Android-powered "Dream" Smartphone not only intensify the competition among suppliers, but also provide an open-source foundation for mobile web applications. This thesis introduces a new mobile web application taxonomy to systematically study the values and the groupings of the mobile web applications. By introducing features and categories, the taxonomy provides a framework so the related companies and businesses can be comparatively analyzed and summarized. Selected case companies are studied in the light of the taxonomy. The thesis discusses the key issues of mobile web aggregation, namely, mobile application development platform, context modeling, mobile user interface, mobile application logic, and mobile web aggregation strategy.(cont.) "System Thinking" is applied to the management of mobile web application business. The market ecosystem, the value proposition, and the revenue model for mobile web application are described. A system dynamic model is constructed to understand the dynamic among the key factors in the mobile web business. Experimental results are reported in the thesis.by Kevin Hao Liu.S.M

Responsive Environments Digital Out-of-Home Advertising: A Deeper Level of Interaction through Environments Data Analytics

The advertising industry is undergoing a revolution thanks to the development of digital media. Digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising is part of this revolution. It refers to digital media used for marketing purposes in public and outdoor locations. The industry is growing by about 40% per year and is expected to reach US $7 billion annually. This thesis project aims to create a deeper level of interaction with DOOH audiences through environmental data analytics. The project allows the advertising team to create a display wherein the billboard content changes automatically and synchronically with changes in the display’s environment. Since digital out-of-home (DOOH) offers a market of absolute growth, I am also investigating how to introduce and launch this interactive solution to the DOOH advertising Industry. This plan is for the start-up of SunDOOH Consulting in Toronto, Canada and serves major U.S. market