Our great contributor Ubergizmo.com is attending and covering the conference Demo 2008 held at the Marriott Desert Springs in Palm Desert, California.

Let’s take a look at several companies followed by Ubergizmo that have dragged our attention.

• DEMO 08 - Not Business as Usual session
• DEMO 08 - It Will Be Paid by Advertising Session

Find all the sources, and discover more consumer electronics news and reviews at Ubergizmo.com.

Watch below the official videos from Demo 2008:

Liquidus
Liquidus provides low-cost commercial advertising video production, distribution and placement to local businesses, on digital cable video on demand (VOD), online, standard TV, eTV/IPTV and eventually mobile devices, via an easy to use web interface business owners can customize the advertising video.

TubeMogul
Monetization is the greatest challenge that web video creators are facing today. Tubemogul helps video producers upload their content on multiple video websites from a single web page. In addition, it provides a set of analytics tools to track when, where, who and how often the video was watched. Users can monitor accurately how popular their videos are and share the data with their colleagues.

Visible Measures
Visble Measures tracks users behavior with online video, their tools are capable of monitoring the audience of a video clip second by second. For the demo, the CEO showed us how an advertising was ineffective as the majority of the audience stopped watching before the product was shown. Other functions include a location based audience tracking tool. Read more in my previous article

Find all the sources, and discover more consumer electronics news and reviews at Ubergizmo.com.

Last Thursday L’Atelier North America, the High Tech studio for a changing world, launched its very first Atelier Tech Radar.

- Green and Clean Energies

- Semantic Web

- Situational Advertisement

- On-line Video

- Artificial Intelligence

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In 2007, local online advertising was an $8.5 billion market. Analysts are announcing a 48 percent increase in 2008, bringing it to $12.6 billion. Internet companies understood what significant adjustments it takes to lead the local online advertising market. Newspapers are going down and losing market share.

Pure-play Web companies now have the largest share of the local online-ad market. A pretty significant turn over for newspaper companies who were enjoying a 44.1 percent share of the $8.5 billion local ad-market, and are now down of 10.7 points which let them today a 33.4 percent share. Internet companies have now 43.7 percent of market share, according to Borrell Associates, a consulting firm that tracks local advertisings. (Directories such as the Yellow Pages have 10.1% and local television outlets 9.3%)

Newspapers are feeling the biggest effects of this competition.

Online-ad revenue at newspapers made up no more than 7.1% of total revenue in the third quarter of last year, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

“Newspapers are tied too closely to defending their print products and have not seen the Internet as an innovative and competitive tool to go out and compete,” explains Gordon Borrell, chief executive of Borrell Associates.

Web companies now rule the market for local ads online, forcing newspaper publishers to rush to change the way they sell ads.

The majority of the radio stations and TV stations, newspapers, cable companies, are still pinning their hopes on their traditional sales teams being able to specialize in the digital market, and create and sell new online ad packages.

An explanation coming from the Wall Street Journal could be the following: Local media companies, because they are based in the communities they serve, would seem to have an edge over Internet sellers when it comes to persuading the diner or corner hardware store to take out an ad. But they have largely failed to convert that advantage into sales. Instead of tailoring their sales to local businesses, many newspaper companies initially focused on selling ads to bigger advertisers who were already buying space in their print products.

While this strategy allowed them to quickly and cheaply create a customer base for their online ventures, it also limited their growth, because they weren’t expanding their customer base.”

“Many newspapers also hurt themselves by simply plopping their papers online instead of creating new Web sites that offered advertisers something they couldn’t get in print. Meanwhile, Web companies such as Google and Local.com are growing rapidly because they have made it cheap and easy for local companies to take out ads,” says Journalist Emily Steel.

What will become of the local online-ads market in 2008?

The popularity of local search and online video advertising will drive most of the growth, confirmed by a recent study from Borrell Associates.

“Key advertising segments for 2008 will continue to be the “Big 3” classified categories of automotive, recruitment and real estate, with online political marketing holding promise for local sites as state and presidential campaigns heat up,” says the report.

More than a year ago, Yahoo! came up with a plan with about six newspapers to establish a nationwide online-ad sales network. Since then, other newspapers have joined the alliance. This year, papers in the alliance aim to sell more-sophisticated ad offerings, such as behaviorally targeted ads, thanks to Yahoo! Technology that they will take advantage of and use on their Web sites.

Meanwhile, 300 newspapers, recently represented by a group of 11 newspaper companies, formed a partnership with real-estate site Zillow.com to strike into more real-estate classified ads.

So what we expect for this coming year are papers making the decision to form and join more profound alliances with their major competition in order to survive. And even thought giant Internet companies are starving for the growth they observe in the local market, they are also finding benefits to partnering with local media businesses to reinforce their own efforts.

But with a spending for local online ads expected to grow 48% next year to $12.6 billion, the opportunity is still there for newspapers. And what could be necessary is a greater investment in an independent online sales force that would continue the growth these properties have enjoyed for the past few years.

Mathieu Ramage
Media and Editorial Manager of Atelier

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A survey released last month reveals that about half of the online adult population has looked up themselves or someone else online, up from 22 percent in 2002. The amount of information about ourselves that is available on the Web seems not to be an issue for 60 percent of us.

This very interesting study reveals that 47 percent of Internet users have searched for themselves online, 36 percent said they have searched on the Internet for a person with whom they’ve lost touch, and 9 percent have looked up information on the one they were dating.

It seems that women are a bit more likely than men to research someone they are dating or someone they are about to meet. And on the other hand, more men than women have looked up friends, someone from their past or a colleague or competitor. 53 percent, for a majority under the age of 50, have looked up an acquaintance on the Web.

“The increasing amount of personal information online has drawn attention among privacy advocates, who worry about how it could be used and who controls it. Most recently, they decried a new Facebook advertising program that broadcasted its users’s online purchase and other online actions to their friends and network,” wrote Ellen Lee, a San Francisco Chronicle writer. The Pew report suggested that most Internet users are not concerned about their personal information online.

Among adults who have a public social-networking profile, 60 percent said that anyone who happens upon it can see, and have not felt compelled to limit it. While 38 percent have taken steps to control it, it’s been found that the same percentage restrict access to their friends.

“People aren’t being super cautious about what they’re doing or presenting online,” explains Mary Maden, co-author of the report and senior research specialist with Pew.

A new way in the final round of a recruiting process for employers is to search online for someone they were about to hire or work with. And 11 percent of them are doing it. Valuable recommendations from job hunters are to not post photographs or personal information that could hurt their chances with employers.

The conclusions, published by Pew Internet & American Life Project, reflect how everyone is sharing always more of their lives on the Internet, and how so-called “Web 2.0 sites” such as Youtube, Facebook and Flickr are encouraging their users to post home videos, photographs and personal profiles online, including private data ranging from their favorite dates to their mobile phone number.

Reminds me sadly theses stories where women find out, through Myspace, about their boyfriends cheating on them.

Mathieu Ramage
Media and Editorial Manager of Atelier North America

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As symbols,Cyber Monday and "Buy Nothing Day" stand for two opposite lifestyles. Because of growing concerns about our impact on the environment, the debate is a serious one that goes beyond personal life choices.

As opposed to Black Friday when shoppers are on holidays and predominantly hit crowded malls, Cyber Monday marks the rise of shopping-on-the-job on companies’ time and broadband connections. It makes one wonder how companies feel about that!

Click To Play

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The Daily Footprint Project has taken me to the micro level of my personal footprint, down to the most minute details. I am only one out of six billion people, however. How do I fit within the larger picture? I wanted to know. I found this world map of environmental footprint on the Footprint Network:

The map tells me I am in the largest red zone, along with 300 millions other Americans. Together, we have succeeded at becoming the largest offenders against the environment, both in terms of our per capita and combined environmental footprint (from Living Planet Report):

 I am left wondering where does the nine point six come from? What is it about the way we live in this country that makes us such outrageous consumers of the world’s resources? Here is what came to my mind, in random order:

1. round the clock services
2. big cars
3. big houses
4. master bedrooms
5. hot tubs
6. pools
7. large food servings
8. big appliances
9. big everything
10. driving everywhere
11. love of electronics
12. waste, throw away culture
13. malls as meccas
14. online shopping
15. suburbia
16. credit cards
17. advertising
18. red meat
19. processed foods
20. cheap gas
21. cheap water
22. cheap electricity

If only things were not so big, and cheap, and convenient, we would not be so tempted to consume as much. I know I wouldn’t. I don’t whenever I go back to France. And the statistics are here to prove it.

By La Marguerite, Atelier’s green contributor

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Black Friday, really is a black day. Andrew Revkin, from DotEarth, and Kate, one of the readers of this blog, both called my attention to a very sad case of corporate sponsorship. What’s involved? A TV ad from Adbusters promoting Buy Nothing Day:

What saddens me most, is not so much MTV’s reaction, as what it symbolizes in terms of the American culture. Consumption is the engine that drives our country. Beaucoup dollars are involved, and the little pig is foraging where it shouldn’t. There are certain things in this country that cannot be questioned, and consumption is one of them. The pig is doing a good job of stirring the pot.

It is important to recognize however, that trying to fight consumption in this country, and other ‘developed countries‘ for that matter, is a lost cause. Nowhere was it more clear to me, than during my recent visit to the San Francisco Green Festival. As I suggest in ‘Green Festival or Celebration of Green Consumption?‘, a better question to ask, is how can we redirect consumption towards greener alternatives?

By La Marguerite, Atelier’s green contributor

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This week, Atelier reviews what is trendy on the web magazine of our great expert contributor. Ubergizmo.com is dedicated to consumer electronics news and reviews.

Virtual computer runs on no hardware

Retrevo.com new version: matching people and gadgets

HTC Touch gets a facelift

Shopping carts get text displays

Maya Single media apparatus

NifNaks creepie crawly USB flash drives

Blowable computer interface

Solar roofing tiles from DRI Energy

Find all the sources, and discover more consumer electronics news and reviews at Ubergizmo.com.

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Introducing the new iPod Touch commercial, by Nick Haley

Nick Haley’s original version:

Apple’s repolished version: