Peter Chun

While the adidas Stan Smith is a classic with its clean and simple design, this white leather perforated leather should be a nice addition for the Spring and Summer months. This sneaker is of course named after Stan (Stanley Roger) Smith who was an American tennis pro during the early 1960s. Look for this classic at adidas Originals retailers as well as on eBay.

> BUY IT: adidas Stan Smith 1 Graph - White Perf

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After years of telling advertisers that the way they place ads is totally wrong, Google is finally coming around to accommodate Madison Avenue on its own terms. By perfecting paid-search and contextual ads, Google has done a lot to reinvent advertising. But old habits die hard, and advertisers still like to target ads based on good old demographics. Google will be doing a lot more of that now that it owns DoubelClick. But it is also starting to incorporate demographic targeting into AdWords itself (in a very limited fashion).

As of last Friday, advertisers could target their ads by age or gender on 31 participating sites in Google’s ad network that provide such information. The most noteworthy ones are MySpace, Friendster, and YouTube. The rest, with a few exceptions, aren’t exactly the type of sites that big advertisers clamor for, so this isn’t going to have a big immediate impact. (Here is a list of the participating sites). AdWords already lets advertisers target demographically by site, taking generalized demographic data for entire sites from comScore. But this is different because it allows targeting by individual user.

You’ve got to wonder if this is how Google hopes to fix its MySpace problem. Google watchers will recall that when the company missed its fourth quarter earnings, it partly blamed the poor performance of its ads on social networks (read: MySpace). By offering demographic targeting on MySpace and other social sites, perhaps Google is hoping to turn that around. It certainly needs to do something to make all of that social-network ad inventory pay off.

Marrying demographic targeting with keyword targeting should yield better results in theory. The issue, though, might not be the targeting. It might be the people. Or rather, it might be that the people you find on social networks are just better at tuning out ads. Perhaps they are less receptive to traditional advertising in what they consider to be a semi-private space. So it may not be so much the targeting as the ad units themselves that need fixing. They need to seem less like blaring come-ons and more like social invitations. And there is not much Google can do about that.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The Clubber Lang Mids are set to release next month in April. Clubber Lang is a fictional character that appeared as Rocky Balboa’s rival in the 1982 movie Rocky III. He was played by the popular “bodyguard to the stars” Mr. T, who was 25 years old when the film was launched. The character is based on George Foreman in his early career, the colorway of the sneaker is based off of his trunks and belt.

Discuss in our forum - http://forums.nikeskateboarding.org

The first DunkXchange in Boston is coming to Re-Up next Saturday on the 29th. 1-6pm EST. Info after the jump… (more…)

Setting allies with Phu , SBTG presents to you, a kamikaze mission “Death from Above”. A fictitious battle between 2 rival airborne squadrons. The Death Seeker AF1s and the Phantom Mirage AM90s. A one time show down, 8 fighters per squadron. Available March 30th, 10pm est, only available @ Royalefam shop

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It’s been a whole year since the launch of live video streaming site Justin.TV , and there is no shortage of competitors (Ustream, BlogTV, Kyte, Stickam, Mogulus, Yahoo Live, LiveVideo). (See more of our coverage here). But Justin.TV looks like it is holding its own in this still-nascent part of the Web. “So far,,” notes CEO Michael Seibel, “Justin.tv has more than 50 years of video stored in its archives and we have accumulated 10 of those years over the past 30 days.”

Here are some more stats provided by the company, both cumulative for the past year and for the past 30 days:

1 Year Statistics:

* 87,331,037 pageviews
* 24,954,403 unique visitors
* 57 years of archives
* 28,106 total channels
* 356,197 registered users
* 73,754 user created video clips

Last 30 day stats

* 21,409,755 pageviews
* 5,963,775 uniques
* 11 years of archives
* 6,954 new channels
* 73,534 registered users
* 26,500 user created video clips

Peaks:

* 3.6 gbps video
* 32,000 simultaneous viewers

Update: Here is a graph from Justin.TV, of only its site’s pageviews, unique visitors, and returning visitors (worldwide):

Here are the comScore stats for the site alone. (Justin.TV is the red line). Note that these tell a very different story, with only 293,000 uniques in February (compared to the 6 million claimed by the company). These are all U.S. stats, but the trends roughly match the worldwide stats from comScore as well. I present them here only to give a sense of how it is doing as a destination site versus some of its competitors. (Here is Alexa and Compete). As a destination site, it looks to be doing better than UStream and BlogTV:

But not quite as well as Kyte.TV or StickCam (although the numbers are so low for all of these sites, that it is still anybody’s game):

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OpenID, a distributed single sign on solution that allows people to sign into different services with the same login credentials, gained significant momentum over the last year as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL all pledged their support for the initiative.

There are two ways companies/websites can participate in the OpenID framework - as “issuing parties” or as “relying parties.” Issuing parties make their user accounts OpenID compatible. Relying parties are websites that allow users to sign into their sites with credentials from Issuing parties. Of course, sites can also be both. In fact, if they aren’t both it can be confusing and isn’t a good user experience.

The problem, though, is that the Big Four Internet companies that I mentioned above have made big press announcements about their support for OpenID, but haven’t done enough to actually implement it. Microsoft has done absolutely nothing, even though Bill Gates announced their support over a year ago. Google has limited its support to Blogger, where it is both an Issuing and Relying party. Yahoo and AOL are Issuing parties only.

This isn’t just toe dipping in the OpenID pool to see how things go before jumping in. Putting my conspiracy theory hat on, it looks to me like these companies want all the positive press that comes from adopting this open standard, but none of the downside. By becoming Issuing parties, AOL and Yahoo hope to see their users logging in all over the Internet with those credentials. But they don’t accept IDs from anywhere else, so anyone that uses their services has to create new credentials with them. It’s all gain, no pain.

I spoke to Bill Washburn (the Executive Director of OpenID and only paid employee) and David Recordan (Vice Chair of OpenID) today about the hesitation of the big guys to fully implement OpenID. Both were careful not to criticize, noting that the support of these companies has been an important driver of OpenID awareness. But both also said that they would really like to see full implementation happen sooner rather than later.

Recordan says that at least 11,000 sites now take OpenID credentials for sign on (see image to right). Among them are some large services like 37Signals and LiveJournal. And the open source community has been great about building OpenID support into their software, Recordan says, so that others building on that software can launch Relying party services. Among the projects that support it are Drupal, Movable Type, Wordpress.org, Ruby on Rails and MediaWiki. But all of those services put together have nowhere near the user footprint of any of the Big Four.

I’ll say what the OpenID Foundation cannot, for political reasons - It’s time for these companies to do what’s right for the users and fully adopt OpenID as relying parties. That doesn’t fit in with their strategy of owning the identity of as many Internet users as possible, but it certainly fits in with the Internet’s very serious need for an open, distributed and secure single log in system (OpenID is all three).

If and when the Big Four become relying parties, the floodgates will truly open and there will be no looking back. And until they do that, I’m not buying that they really support what OpenID is trying to accomplish.

By the way, Chris Messina has done an excellent job of monitoring these and other companies that have promised OpenID support but are yet to implement it. Keep pressuring them, Chris.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The Court Force has been huge in Asia with lots of exclusive colorways to the region. The US and the rest of the world will get some nice colorways with the Air Max inspired Court Force pack. Here is a nice simple new Court Force Low in monotoned white, black and grey colors. On the upper, the swoosh is a patent black and a nice pattern is featured on the side forefoot. Look for this colorway at NikeStore now.

> BUY IT: Nike Court Force Low - White - Black - Cool Grey

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Modu, an Israeli startup founded in 2007, is going to be adding $100 million to the $20 million in venture capital they’ve already raised, says Israeli newspaper The Globes. The company will create tiny modular phones that can be slipped into different device “jackets”— like an MP3 player, GPS, bigger cell phone, car stereo, or digital camera (see here for a demo video).

The round hasn’t closed yet, but clearly the details are leaking. The Globes isn’t naming the new investors but says that the company is being valued at $150 million pre-money, meaning they’re giving away a whopping 40% of the equity in this round. They must really need the money to get the product to market to take that kind of dilution.

Founder Dov Moran’s previous company, M-Systems, pioneered the concept of the USB flash drive and sold to SanDisk for $1.6 billion in 2006. See an interview with Moran here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

LongJump, a hosted applications environment that competes with the likes of Salesforce and Coghead, is introducing a new visual workflow system meant to streamline business processes.

Companies will be able to set up this workflow system in conjunction with existing LongJump applications, such as those that track businesses’ assets or contracts. Before the introduction of this workflow system, these applications could be used to manage databases of relevant objects. Now they can also be used to program and execute on procedures that regularly occur around them.

Do expense requests usually go through your company’s hierarchy before getting approved? You can now chart this process in LongJump with “states” and “actions”, respectively represented as circles and vectors in the visual workflow creation tool. Each circle represents a type of person within the company (supervisor, manager, CEO, etc) that must make a decision on the expense request (approve, deny, issue check, etc). These decisions cause the request to travel along the vectors until a final conclusion to the process (request fulfilled).

This process would ordinarily be accomplished over email or even physical slips of paper that make their way through various “in” and “out” boxes around the office. Now it can all be handle in one central online location with variously designated user accounts for employees.

LongJump says that its workflow solution is the first to come integrated with a full-featured database application suite. Competitors include Appian (a hosted solution) and Tipco Business Studio (non-hosted), but these must be used with something like Oracle or SAP. Since many large corporations are happy with their existing database solutions, this new workflow product will appeal mostly to small and medium-sized businesses.

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