Filed under: Products and services, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising

If you’re a Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) user, you probably enjoy the relatively high quality of the company’s products at t cost of — zero. How does Google give all this away for free, you ask? It’s the same as any other company on the web that features quality products at no cost. The cost is your privacy. You are paying, and paying large.

Do you mind? It’s hard to state what kind of personal, financial and psychological profile Google has on millions of its customers, but you can believe that this large marketing database exists. How Google manages this will be the most important decision in the company’s young, decade-old existence, but the question remains: do many of us sell our souls for freebies? Each time you sign up for something free but fill out a complete demographic profile to get it, you’re selling out. Google is doing nothing different — but its scale is so huge that all this data controlled by one entity does cause for concern among the informed consumer inside us all. It should, anyway.

Google, like anyone in business who is savvy, knows that giving away products or services for “free” on the front end is made up for on the back end. In other words, would you rather pay for every single product or service you use and not have any entity know how to market to you — or would you rather get a good majority of your products and services at no cost but with the attached condition that there are lots of entities out there that know you better than you know yourself?

More importantly, they know how to push your exact buttons to have you behaving like a robotic consumer or a slot machine junkie? With the U.S. consumer responsible for two-thirds of economic activity (as tiny as that’s at the moment), the harnessing of this kind of power becomes clear. Okay, I’m off to perform a Google search…

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Filed under: Television, Magazines, Marketing and advertising, Media World

It’s being reported that Playboy’s (NYSE: PLA) Hugh Hefner’s relationship with Holly Madison is over. Madison, as you probably know, was Hefner’s head girlfriend, but he has two others as well: Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquadt. The four of them star in a reality show called The Girls Next Door, which runs on the E! channel. It’s a pretty fun show, even though it does make me maddeningly envious of Hef’s lifestyle. That aside, it seems to be a decent brand ambassador for the Playboy image. Unfortunately, the popularity of the show hasn’t been enough to offset losses at the media company. Playboy’s stock currently sits below $3 a share. It is the exact opposite of one of Hef’s playmates: downright depressingly hideous.

Well, I can’t really comment as to how the Hefner/Madison affair will turn out. Will she go back with him? Is this just a publicity stunt? I simply don’t know. However, I would envision that, with Playboy’s stock in the dumps, a breakup might be an event that could be exploited to help out the company. Let’s face it: the whole three-girlfriend thing is pretty much an orchestrated machine anyway. So, if Madison truly does feel like she’s ready to move on with her career, I think Hef should clean home and get rid of the other two girls as well. Then, he could go on a search for three new girls next door (or maybe he should search for more, why stop at just three?). It could be an integrated media campaign spanning the magazine, the website, and a new reality show.

If CEO Christie Hefner played her cards correctly, she might drum up a lot of interest in the Playboy magazine with a scheme like this. The flagship publication is what’s killing the stock right now. Until that turns around, I don’t think the stock is going to be a viable investment idea. What she could do is put together a search that would feature hundreds of prospects in the publication. They might then stay at the mansion and get weeded out through various tasks as is typical of any reality show. An adult version of the reality show could run simultaneously on the Playboy cable offerings. For all I know, maybe he’s run searches for girlfriends in the past. If so, he needs to do it again.

Something has to be done to get Playboy back on track. This won’t do the trick by itself, of course, but I think it would nevertheless constitute a cool effort that would open up new marketing opportunities. Manufactured or not, I’m sure Hef enjoys his ladies. But come on, Hugh, isn’t it time for some new blood? And don’t you want to do something to help out your stock? There are a lot of shareholders out there who are depending on you, because, even at the low single-digit price level, I don’t think the stock is ready to rebound yet.

Disclosure: I don’t own any company mentioned; positions can change at any time.

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Filed under: Utilities, Productivity

If you don’t already use a timer to boost your productivity you’re missing out. Pretty much each productivity book, blog and web site out there recommends a timer to help you get things done.

Some of you might be going old school and using a kitchen timer. But, if you’ve had enough of that once adorable ticking chicken, check out cool timer.

It’s quick and easy to download and equally easy to use. You can set it up to be an alarm clock, a count down timer or a stopwatch. When the designated time arrives, cool timer can play a preset sound or an MP3 file from your personal library.

I like to set a timer for a certain amount of time when doing chores like cleaning the kitchen or working on tasks I don’t enjoy as much. That way, I know I only have to do it for a certain amount of time. The added bonus with cool timer is that I can play some tunes I enjoy at the end of the task. Right now I’m enjoying “Sweet Home Chicago” from the Blues Brothers soundtrack every time my cool timer goes off.

[Via Lifehacker]

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Filed under: Products and services, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising

Google, Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube continues to take the lion’s share of the online video market. Although startup Hulu.com — which will broadcast the U.S. Presidential candidate debate live tonight — has come on strong, YouTube has it. Everyone from teens with $69 digital cameras to professional videographers are uploading video footage to the site.

Google announced recently that it was upping the file size of uploaded video to the site as well — by a factor of 10. Going from 100 Megabytes to 1 Gigabyte per uploaded video is extraordinary in and of itself, but this will make YouTube all the more attractive to those who want to take rather exhaustive video and upload it for all to see while not being constrained.

For example, five minutes of video on a standard digital camera (just an average, of course) will easily eat up 100 Megabytes of storage. Since we’re not all video compression experts, Google — with this change — has just granted its on the web video universe to expand in a large way.

In addition to the video file size increase, YouTube’s new uploader will grant multiple file uploads at the same time. This is also a rather big change from the “upload and wait” scenario of the past. Although Google surely wants to make more money from the huge amount of video viewed each minute on YouTube, giving regular customers the ability to have more massive videos (and several at one) uploaded should just push it that much further in front of the online video pack. What it needs now is to lift the 10-minute limitation for non-partners. But then again, that would invite a whole new universe of copyright piracy. Maybe.

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