At the celebration event where we announce the winners, we've invited a close friend and business associate of mine, Ira Ehrenpreis of Palo Alto's Technology Partners, to speak.  He's called a Venture Capital Visionary and a Cleantech Expert in his bio, and I can attest that it's all true and much, much more.  As a board member of Tesla Motors, I've worked closely with him, experiencing his broad knowledge and keen business and cleantech acumen.  It's no mystery to me why our event was sold out two weeks in advance -- the "secret sauce" was being fortunate enough to have Ira Ehrenpreis as our keynote speaker.

Lastly, this month we're rolling out Colorado's Cleantech State Plan, or Roadmap as we often call it.  In spring of 2010, the Colorado Cleantech Industry Association commissioned Navigant Consulting, Inc., to analyze the state's clean technology core competencies in relation to the competitive landscape; map the state's assets and barriers; identify gaps; and propose a 3-5 year action plan to continue growing targeted sectors within the cleantech industry.  Key findings of this 5-month, $200K project will be shared at a Colorado State Capitol news conference on October 18th.  We're all clamoring to hear all the details shared at the conference, so stay tuned.

PS: for those that missed it, the Colorado Biz Magazine published this overview of the state of Colorado's Cleantech industry in partnership with the CCIA.  It's a great read, and it's exciting to see Colorado lead the country in so many areas.

Users are unhappy because the ads aren't relevant, and advertisers are unhappy because they can't get users to engage (click through rates on social networking sites are abysmally low).

Enter Realtime Ads. Realtime ads are the perfect way for an advertiser to connect with a user in a social environment, from realtime search on OneRiot, to Promoted Tweets on Twitter, to social networks like Facebook and MySpace, to media sharing sites like Twitpic and Blip.fm. The opportunity is massive, measured in the hundreds of billions of page views per month.

What is a realtime ad?

An ad is 'Realtime Relevant' if it matches the user's behavior of consuming information and sharing that information with their friends. Realtime ads are created as they become relevant across the realtime web. Realtime ads can be Tweets, search ads or display ads that contain content that is relevant right now. For a primer on how the technology works for realtime ads, check out my previous post.

It can be timely commerce - from a special deal on flowers just before Mother's Day to the hottest HDTV on sale just before the Superbowl. It can be content, from TMZ getting their content in front realtime web users as it's published, to American Express talking about the best iPad apps for business users. It can be lead-gen ads for mortgage companies to engage future customers by providing good advice on how to best take advantage of the latest tax incentives.

Realtime ads are 'Realtime Relevant.’ They matter to you right now. When you see them you want to consume the content and share it with friends. Realtime ads are the perfect way for an advertiser to connect with users in a social environment.

Who is a Realtime Advertiser?

Realtime advertisers span the universe of all traditional advertisers. They include:

• Big brands like Coca-Cola and American Express


• E-commerce sites from Amazon to your local flower shop


• Publishers like Huffington Post and TMZ looking to build their brand as a content destination for realtime web users


• Insurance and mortgage companies driving leads by creating compelling content around their products

American Express is an excellent example of a brand that understands the way to connect with users of the realtime web. They create content everyday that is relevant to their small business audience. From “Top iPad Business Apps” to “What Twitter's New Ad Model Means for Small Business” American Express' content is shared hundreds of times a day across the realtime web. American Express can now use realtime ad technology to push their hot content out into the realtime web as it becomes relevant. They build their brand by creating ads that users want to consume and share with their friends and colleagues right now.

Amazon has products that are ‘Realtime Relevant’ every day. From Sarah Palin's latest book to iPad accessories and Mother's Day presents. Realtime ad technology knows when to put the right products at the right time in front of the realtime web audience. On any one day there are hundreds of ‘Realtime Relevant’ products being sold on the web. They are the kinds of products people are talking about today (from the Nexus One to the Tesla Model S).

Publishers can use realtime ad technology to build their brand on the realtime web. Realtime ad technology gets their hottest content in front of users seconds after it is published, ensuring that their content gets shared and becomes viral before their competitors. The brand value of being the first place people heard about Michael Jackson dying or the Tiger Woods affair is invaluable to publishers.

We all hate those dancing mortgage ads on social networking sites. By using realtime technology, mortgage companies can finally become a relevant, value-add to the social experience. Using realtime ad technology, a mortgage company can start creating content that helps users of the realtime web understand the latest in tax incentives, how the economy affects your mortgage, and day-to-day pricing changes. Using realtime ads, even mortgage companies can create ads that matter to you right now.

Why Advertise in Realtime?

If a brand or ecommerce site want to connect with users in a social or realtime environment, they need to advertise in realtime. With over 500 million users and growing fast, the realtime web represents one of the biggest underserved markets in history. For the brands that take the lead here, it represents a land grab of epic proportions. Imagine being the authority for business advice across Twitter and Facebook as American Express is driving towards. Or the ecommerce site of record for a new generation of buyers who live on the realtime web.

The question is not “Why advertise in realtime?” The question is, “Who are the brands and businesses that are going to be built off the realtime web?” If you want to be of those brands, you need to move fast because it is happening right now.

And now the world is watching as Twitter announces its version of how users will interact with ads in realtime.

Given that, we thought this would be a good time to share some of the insights we've learned and the challenges that we see us all facing as we tackle the problem of monetizing in a realtime web environment. (For specifics on our RiotWise product for monetizing the realtime web, click here.)

Some really good things we’ve learned:

1. Users are open to ads as long as they’re relevant to their realtime experience.


2. Advertisers really want to create ads that are relevant to the realtime experience.


3. Realtime applications are starting to make serious money through advertising!

Some really hard challenges all of us face:

1. Realtime targeting is complex


2. Data is everything


3. Advertisers need to be taught how to engage in a realtime experience.

OneRiot has been at it since October (beta launch in January), and in April we expect to exceed 1/2 billion ad impressions across our network of realtime apps.

Our impressions are in the stream (e.g. on Twitter apps like UberTwitter and social desktop apps like Digsby) and they are in search (e.g. on OneRiot.com). Recently we’ve started distributing them across the wider web through traditional ad units.

What we’ve discovered is that when the ad is relevant to a trending topic, relevant to what people are talking about on the realtime web, the click thru rate goes through the roof. In other words, if iPad is trending, and we promote the hottest accessories for the iPad, realtime web users love it. Even on mobile, the CTR goes from an industry average of 0.1-0.2% to over 1% and sometimes even higher. We’ve had CTRs as high as 8% when we really nail it.

Realtime targeting is complex

Every realtime ad engine is different, but the nature of the problem is the same. How do you adjust ads in realtime? People’s attention comes in bursts that you can seldom predict, and a hot topic will move millions of people around the web in minutes. How does an advertiser get in front of those people with an ad that resonates right now?

For ads in the stream, we do our realtime targeting in two steps. First we identify the trending topics for each application and audience. Not just “iPad”, but “iPad Sales Hit 300,000 on Day 1″ and “iPad Jailbroken.” This gives us anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 trending topics per day. Users on UberTwitter tend to like certain categories of topics (defined by CTR) and users on Digsby like other categories. Our system uses CTR feedback to determine how to divvy up the topics by application and audience. This gets tuned and refined throughout the day, in realtime, to optimize CTR.

On the advertiser side we ingest content and products that our advertisers like to promote in realtime as they have it. For content, we take it in using our realtime indexing technology within seconds of it being published. E.g. Coca-Cola had a campaign that produced content around the NCAA tournament. We had their content in our index the minute it was published, and as it became relevant to trending topics we pushed it out to the appropriate applications (Digsby users absolutely love sports content). For products, we index all the top selling products on the web and surface them as they relate to trending topics (from iPad accessories to movie tickets to Clash of the Titans - bad movie, btw). All ads are created as the products and content become available and so they are always ready ahead of time to be matched to our trending topics.

This is especially important for search, where it is impractical for advertisers to create ads and buy keywords after a term has become hot. Not only is it a lot of work for the advertiser because terms are not predictable, but by the time the ad is created, users have already moved on to the next hot topic of the day. OneRiot advertisers don't buy keywords. That process would be too slow to monetize on the realtime web. They simply let us index their ads and we do all the realtime matching for them.

Using trending topics and pre-indexing of all ads, we're able to make sure our ads are relevant to the realtime web user. Even before we started optimizing, our network wide CTR was 4 to 5 times what our partners were seeing using traditional 'static' ads. Now that we have the data, we are starting to really optimize our ads in realtime.

Data is everything

Having the technology to optimize in realtime doesn't do much for you unless you have the data to crunch. And you need a lot of data. We're currently processing about 12 - 15 million impressions a day. Depending on the app we can start to make a real impact on click thru rates. For an app that has 100,000 impressions per day we can improve CTR by 20-30%. For an app with over 1,000,000 impressions/day we can often double the CTR.

That is huge for the application. Not only are you generating up to twice the revenue as before, but the user engagement doubles as well. No app developer wants ads in their product that hurts the user experience, and no user wants an app that has those ads (will the person who invented dating and mortgage ads please stand up?).

User engagement for ads is key for realtime apps because each one is still in the early days of competing for market share. Poor quality or irrelevant ads might generate some cash, but will send your users straight over to your competitor's product. Apps with ads that are 'realtime relevant' will generate revenue without getting in the way of the user experience.

Advertisers need to be taught how to connect with users in realtime

Probably the most exciting thing about the realtime web is how fast advertisers are moving to connect with realtime web users. Social Media has become a core part of every advertiser's plan in 2010 and it is only getting better every day.

The challenge though is that advertisers need to learn the difference between connecting with users in realtime and their traditional channels. Coca-Cola might have a great campaign for promoting their brands on TV, but use that same campaign on the realtime web and it falls flat. But when Coca-Cola creates a campaign around the NCAA that is built on original content being published throughout the day by their fans, realtime web users love it. And that was only the first attempt. Crispin Porter Bogusky, Coca-Cola's ad agency and one of our early partners, will take the lessons from this campaign and make the next one even better.

As brands like Coca-Cola start to show success in the realtime web, other advertisers will follow. The result will be better ads for all of us. Ads that bring us closer to the brands we love because they're speaking in the language we love... Realtime.

1. The Denver/Boulder area has the highest per capita density of software engineers in the country. Whoa!


2. Boulder has the highest concentration of college graduates in the country (59% have a bachelor's degree or higher -- the next highest is 47%!)


3. Forbes magazine calls it one of the best places for business and careers.


4. It's the healthiest city in the country.


5. It's one of the most bike friendly cities in the country (and after living in California where 20 minute commutes are 'around the corner,' it is awesome to be able to walk or bike to work each day).


6. Boulder is a magnet for interesting people. I've met more interesting physicists, entrepreneurs, designers, investors, and thinkers in Boulder than I have anywhere else. Not only are they here, the nature of the community means that it's easy to bump into folks like this often.