Blog Watch: Friday August 29th

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Money for old rope, throttling the 3G package, and twits all round… when will the silly season end?

Dan Rayburn writes about a new Content Delivery Network that has received funding this week. Yes, another one! According to Dan, VC funding for CDN and P2P delivery networks has already exceeded $325 million in the past 18 months. Enter Conviva, formerly Rinera Networks, which has raised $20 million:

The one thing I really dislike, more than anything else, is a company that talks a big game while delivering nothing more than marketing speak. Instead of Conviva quietly raising the money and not coming to the market and pitching editors on the company until after they have a real story, customers, and product to talk about, they make a big deal now about the company, even though there is nothing to talk about.

And for marketeers reading this (‘marketeers’; what an awful word), why not crib some of the buzzwords in Conviva’s product details on their web site. As Dan Rayburn says:

It reads like a dictionary of the most popular buzz terms in the market today. They manage to get nearly all of them into just a few sentences including “greater brand loyalty”, “engage audience”, “site stickiness”, “monetize perishable content”, “target advertising”, “new platform” and “real-time Intelligence”.

Over at AppleInsider, it’s red faces at Orange. 3G iPhone users in France have accused Orange of intentionally capping 3G download speeds.

Many were furious, arguing that artificial limitation was in direct violation of the service agreements shared between the carrier and its iPhone customers, which theoretically should have allowed HSDPA speeds approaching 7.2Mbps. When contacted by FranceInfo, an Orange representative reportedly confirmed that that the carrier has been deliberately limiting speeds for all 3G capable phones on its network to 384Kbps, saying the move was aimed at ‘preserving the stability of the network.’ Following a meeting on Monday at its Paris headquarters, Orange said it will raise the download cap for iPhone users from 384Kbps to 1Mbps by September 15th.

Meanwhile, in Hollywoodland… The hit AMC series ‘Mad Men‘ is at the centre of an interesting case of viral marketing. Some of the fictional 1960s characters, including Dan Draper and Peggy Olson, are apparently Twittering away like crazy. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the Silicon Alley Insider website that it has received DMCA takedown notices.

We’re assuming that means the notice was sent from AMC, and that the cable channel lodged some kind of copyright infringement claim. But can you claim a copyright on a character’s name? What if someone whose name is Don Draper actually wanted to use a Twitter account himself? Someone liked ‘Mad Men’ enough to create Twitter aliases for the show, and to proselytize on its behalf — and that AMC wants it stopped.

Happily, big bad Hollywood soon called off the dogs and saw sense. In an update:

Deep Focus, the Web marketing group that works for AMC, tells us that they gently nudged their client into rescinding the DMCA takedown notice they’d sent to Twitter. See, in Web marketing parlance, the Twitterers assuming the names of Mad Men characters are actually ‘brand ambassadors’ meant to be cultivated, not thwarted. “Better to embrace the community than negate their efforts,” says a Deep Focus spokesman. We agree!

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