Latest publisher innerActive joins to provide brands and advertisers with in-game and in application adverts

London, UK – 16 December 2009: Mobile marketing agency YOC today announced that monthly page impressions on its UK media network have increased by 41% since June 2009, resulting in more than 240 million page impressions being served each month. The company’s significant growth in the UK means that the YOC UK media network now represents almost half of YOC’s overall European media network which receives over 500 million monthly page impressions.

The latest addition to the UK media network is innerActive, an audience-publisher, aggregating mobile in-applications and in-games inventory across many developers and publishers, and directing it to premium ad sales partners. YOC will work with innerActive to provide brands and advertisers with in-game and in application adverts in over 50 ad-ready games available from various store fronts including Nokia Ovi, Fox Mobile, MTN, Vivid Games, Herocraft and C4M.

Since its launch in July 2008, YOC UK has signed a range of leading publishing houses, media companies and online portals to its media network. innerActive will sit alongside other publishers including 123play.com, GetJar, PC Advisor, Macworld, Pistonheads, What Car, Stuff.tv, Auto Car, Perez Hilton and Peperonity.

“To have increased the monthly page impressions on our UK media network by 41% is a fantastic achievement and a great high for YOC to end the year on,” said Christian Louca, UK Managing Director at YOC. “With us, advertisers can be certain that whoever they want to reach, whatever their target message and no matter what their chosen mechanism, they can get the very best value from their mobile spend.”

Ziv Elul, Co CEO and Founder at innerActive said of the partnership; “Joining YOC’s media network makes a lot of sense for us; bringing us into contact with a number of leading brands and advertisers. We can offer their advertising clients a deeply immersive and effective experience in the games and applications where the click-through rate is more than 3% and the audience consuming this content consists of 20-35 years old males (65%) and females (35%), tech-savvy with disposable income.”

Coverage in the press:

Mobile Entertainment

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/35410/YOC-UK-serves-240m-monthly-page-impressions

Marketing UK

http://www.marketinguk.co.uk/Mobile/YOC-have-announced-that-monthly-page-impressions-on-its-UK-media-network-have-increased-by-41-since-June-2009.asp

Mobile Marketing Magazine

http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.co.uk/2009/12/yoc-sees-uk-ad-growth.html

As if it was taking a war from Tolkien and going one better, Google’s announcement that it will enter the operating system market with Chrome OS is somewhat bewildering to me, given the never-ending debate with Windows vs. Mac OS vs. Linux.

John Fontana asks several key questions in his PC Advisor article on the subject.  I heartily agree with him on a couple of points.

One, trotting out a new OS option in and of itself is not compelling enough.  A new OS is a world apart from a successful OS — as ghosts of OSes past and Microsoft’s painful lesson with Vista will show.  Two, once Google does have Chrome OS available for purchase or pre-installed on netbooks (its initial target market), it really needs to already have a few heavy hitters in the application development scene ready to roll out some game-changing apps with the OS launch.  Chrome OS as a “preferred” OS for Web apps is, again, probably not going to be enough of a deal-making aspect for most PC buyers.

With the growing high-stakes rivalry between Microsoft and Google, it’s an interesting move on the chess board by the latter, to be sure.  Whether it turns out to be a very potent move remains to be seen.

It’s hard to believe, but William Gibson’ novel Neuromancer was published a quarter of a century ago. Full of dystopian predictions about the 21st century, it’s being revisited by technology fans keen to dissect what Gibson got right and how far he was wide of the mark.

An indepth look at Neuromancer’s predictions can be found at: <a href=”http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=118455″>

Microsoft has quietly rolled out a preview release of the Microsoft PC Advisor to select members of the Windows Feedback Program.

Microsoft PC Advisor will:

-Monitor your PC for problems and give you solutions in real-time to fix them.
-Keep your PC running smoothly with important software and driver updates
-Optimize your Windows experience with useful tips and tutorials
-Optimize your PC by monitoring and updating settings
To these points, the PC Advisor includes five main sections: PC Checkup, Toolbox, Offers, Tutorials, and Online Help.

Link: MaximumPC

This weekend, Microsoft quietly rolled out a preview release of the Microsoft PC Advisor to select members of the Windows Feedback Program.  (Members of the Windows Feedback Program agree to let Microsoft monitor their machines closely, and Microsoft uses that data to determine what types of problems real users experience.) The invitation to try out the PC Advisor made some intriguing promises—the app will monitor our PC for problems and give solutions in real time and it will monitor system settings for potential pitfalls. The survey that preceded our download was even more interesting, it hinted that Microsoft’s ultimate goal for the new app is complete Apple domination.

Before we get into the nitty gritty of how PC Advisor works, it’s worth talking about the signup process. Before we could download and install the app, we had to fill out a brief, ten-minute survey. That’s not unusual in and of itself, but the questions we were asked were definitely non-standard. In addition to the typical “What kind of computer do you have?” and “What’s your expertise level?” questions that usually precede entry into Microsoft software betas, this survey asked a bevy of questions about our Linux and OS X predilections. Questions included “How many Apple computers do we own?” “How likely we are to recommend PCs running Windows, OS X, and Linux?” and “How do Windows and OS X make you feel?” Additionally, the PC Advisor preview only works with Vista. It seems like the PC Advisor may be part of Microsoft’s master plan to improve PC users’ confidence in Windows as a platform.

On to the software. The invitation email we received said that the Microsoft PC Advisor will:

• Monitor your PC for problems and give you solutions in real-time to fix them.
• Keep your PC running smoothly with important software and driver updates
• Optimize your Windows experience with useful tips and tutorials
• Optimize your PC by monitoring and updating settings

To these points, the PC Advisor includes five main sections: PC Checkup, Toolbox, Offers, Tutorials, and Online Help. We’ll go over each one separately.

PC Checkup

The centerpiece of the PC Advisor app is the PC Checkup tool. It scans for common (and not so common) problems. We tested the Checkup tool on three machines, and most of the “problems” it found weren’t really problems—disabling UAC is the solution to a problem and switching the power profile doesn’t impact game performance on most desktop machines. Other suggestions were to empty the temporary Internet files (Firefox is the primary browser, so this is a non-tip), enable the Phishing filter in IE (ditto), and turn the Windows Firewall. It didn’t find the simple fix for a game crash that’s plagued us recently—our videocard drivers were two revisions out of date. After we manually updated them from Nvidia’s website, our crashes disappeared.  While we do appreciate the app pointing out that the shortcut for the Disk Cleanup Wizard points to the wrong version on our install of 64-bit Vista, this isn’t a problem that keeps us up at night.

When you choose to fix a problem that the PC Checkup tool finds, you click the Fix button, the app downloads the fix from the Internet, and automatically applies it, without any additional input from the user. Don’t want to install an update? Simple enough—click the trashcan icon, and you won’t be bothered again.

The user experience is a definite improvement over some of the repair tools built into Vista, but the actual fixes are of pretty low value. It bodes well for the future of helpdesk staff and PC repairmen everywhere, but we’ve never actually seen a PC repair application that will solve anything more than the most insignificant problems. We wouldn’t expect a simple mass-market application to troubleshoot overclocking problems, but we do expect it to notify us that our drivers are out of date.

Toolbox

Every nerd loves digging into a Toolbox, right? We usually do, but not in this case. The PC Advisor’s toolbox is nothing more than a list of shortcuts to convenient and frequently accessed areas of your PC’s Control Panel. We didn’t have enough ways to access the Display settings Control Panel, did we? Hopefully, the relatively useless links here are simply a placeholder for something more useful.

Offers

As of Sunday afternoon, there aren’t any offers. We’re not sure exactly what kind of offers we’d expect in an app like this, but we’ll report back when something pops up.

Tutorials

The tutorials section seems to be another interface to expose users to content that’s already hidden on their PCs. The tutorials here cover everything from updating Firewall settings to removing redeye using Windows Photo Gallery. Most of these tutorials are also found by going through the traditional help menus in the relevant apps.

Online Help

Another placeholder, but the online help section contains but a single link to the support.microsoft.com.

The Upshot

Like we said in the beginning, the sole reason to install this app is the PC Checkup tool. The rest of the menu options are either pointers to existing applications, control panels, or help content, or mere placeholders. While the PC Checkup functionality could deliver some interesting functionality, especially if it develops the ability to suss out real PC problems, right now it just offers the kind of non-fixes for non-problems that all other “PC Repair” utilities we’ve tested do. Of course, for eligible testers, this app is free—most of those apps cost $30-$50 and do the exact same thing: nothing.

Editor’s Note: We added “(Quietly)” to the headline, because we were concerned that readers might inadvertently believe that this is a public release of a new application, instead of a “Preview” release for members of the Windows Experience Project.

Leave it to the folks at the UK’s PC Advisor to come up with a trip down operating system memory lane, posted on the magazine’s Web site over the weekend.

For those of us who have been around personal computers since they first hit the scene 30-something years ago, the article reads like a “greatest hits” record collection of how you used to get things done on a keyboard and monitor. I was able to recognize/remember most of the 10 OSes featured, but the one that really drew the “Oh, yeah, THAT!” reaction from me was something called GEOS.

In the 1980s, I was a happy and content Commodore 64 owner, but I didn’t like the way some of my hipper-than-thou computer geek friends would dismiss my system as nothing but a glorified video game machine with a keyboard. When GEOS came along, C64 fanboys like myself finally had something that could prove our computers could be productivity machines, too. Think of GEOS as a sort of early Microsoft Windows or MacOS overlay for the Commodore systems and you’ll get the picture. I think it initially retailed for $79.95 – a pricey piece of software for the C64 – but at that time it was really cool being able to manipulate files on a graphic desktop interface, use a font-rendering 80-column word processor and let your inner Picasso out with the paint program. You didn’t even need a mouse, as you could use the cheaper alternative of a standard nine-pin joystick controller to handle input functions.

Check out the article; you’ll be amazed at some of the facts it provides. Oh, and for the record, I remember the brief TV ad campaign for OS2 Warp in the mid ’90s and I can still operate a PC with MS-DOS command line structure.

Recently i’ve been reading articles about Operating Systems (OS) and especially Windows Vista and 7.

Reading an article in PC Advisor Windows XP, Vista or 7 the verdict. Now we all know that we love XP. However looking at a table in this article just shows one thing. Vista and 7 have more features. Now Windows 7 is coming out i’m begining to wonder are we saying goodbye to Vista way to soon. I mean lets face it, Vista hasn’t had the best of runs. And instead what have Microsoft done. Instead they have created this brand new OS, Windows 7. So what is the best OS?

Right first off there are a few OS’s to steer way clear of. Firstly, no Macs. My friends and I agree that this is a terrible choise in OS. Next there are few distributions of Linux that are reasonably good. The most well know is probably Ubuntu. This isn’t a bad distribution of Linux.

Really this only leaves Windows. Firstly Windows 7. Currently Windows 7 isn’t available to buy. The only way to try Windows 7 is to download the beta version. *NOTE THIS BETA MAY BE UNSTABLE, SO DOWNLOAD AT YOUR OWN RISK* This beta is only available to the first 2.5 million who download it so if it won’t download it’s probably because your too late. To download the beta click here. However, if you are too late but running Windows Vista during the release of Windows 7 there is a possibility of a free upgrade from Vista to 7 however don’t quote me on this because I have only read this from one source and am yet to find out whether this is true.

Next onto Vista. Ok lets be honest, Vista hasn’t worked out too well so far. But i feel that instead of working on ironing out the wrinkles in Vista they have plunged into the deep and created a new OS. This is probably the wrong thing to do as now they are going to have at least one OS with a problem. And it’s most likely that 7 will have problems. And why??? This is just making everyone stick with XP. And with the XP cut off date nigh, no one will buy a new computer. They will upgrade there RAM and stuff like that. Microsoft are just digging themselves into a deep hole and is just getting deeper. Vista is a great OS and Microsoft should have learnt from experienced that they aren’t going to get it perfect first time. With XP they have issued 4 service packs. Vista there is only one. No wonder they aren’t getting anywhere.

And finally the dark horse of the OS world, Windows XP. This is by far everyone’s favourite. The most popular OS ever made. And with everyone loathing Vista, because of it’s bad publicity and not from experience. But they think, just wait out ’till Windows 7 and everything will be fine. But I fail to see how. It’s just going to be a repeat of Vista. People finding flaws and writing numerous complaints. With 4 service packs out Windows XP is pretty much perfect and that’s why it’s everyone’s favourite. However since 14/04/2009 support for Windows XP is no longer free! But, extended support, unfortunatly not free, will last to a further 2014.

So in conclusion, I feel that you need to have the latest MICROSOFT OS. If there are flaws you submit them to Microsoft and they will make a service pack with everyone’s issues and sort it all out.

Thanks for reading.

Matt

* last updated 16/04/09 *

PC Advisor has a good article on its site about the resilient Playstation 2 system and why it is still running strong well after the Playstation 3 hit the market.

If anyone was wondering when the PS2 would really start to fade from sight, all I can say is the current economy has probably added to its already long (for a gaming console) lifespan. New PS2 units are about $129 $99 and you can really find a deal on refurbs for $69 or $79, depending on the model. Although the system’s new game release heyday has passed, new releases continue to be trotted out, ensuring it will continue to be a viable game system for some time to come.

Personally, I think the value attribute is the big reason the PS2 continues to thrive. It’s also the reason the PS3 has been a sales disappointment to date. Unless you must have a Blu-Ray player or there are enough PS3-specific games to sway you, $399 is a tough amount to swallow for home gaming. I’m along with other writers on this subject who believe Sony is going to have little choice but to soon drop the PS3 to a $299 price, if the company wants to see its sales increase at all in this economy.

Update (04/01/09): Sony’s announcement Tuesday that the PS2 is now only $99 is amazing — matched only by the company’s refusal to lower the PS3 system price at all and the ongoing state of denial that its flagship video game console is getting its ass kicked in unit sales by Microsoft and Nintendo.

After hearing about Microsoft’s PC Advisor I thought I’d try it, but it keeps throwing me things I can’t catch. Bummer.

This weekend, Microsoft quietly rolled out a preview release of the Microsoft PC Advisor to select members of the Windows Feedback Program.  (Members of the Windows Feedback Program agree to let Microsoft monitor their machines closely, and Microsoft uses that data to determine what types of problems real users experience.) The invitation to try out the PC Advisor made some intriguing promises—the app will monitor our PC for problems and give solutions in real time and it will monitor system settings for potential pitfalls.

Full story here

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Nice to see a favourable review of the Cube247 Serpens ST6 in the May 2008 edition of PC Advisor magazine.

Specification

• 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
• 500 GB Hard drive
• 22″ display
• 2 x GeForce 9600GT
• 12 x USB 2.0
• 2 x DVD drives
• 5.1 speaker set

Verdict

The pair of 9600GT, combined with 4GB of memory, make this a very powerful gaming system – although you’ll have to make do without a sound card and there’s little room for expansion.

4/5

You can of course upgrade the soundcard from the onboard card to the Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Gamer for £69.

I’m still very fond of my upgraded Cube247 Scorpius ST6.