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Television ad revenues have been on the decline for years as people learn to skip, ignore, or otherwise avoid the commercials during their favorite shows.  Product placement has stepped in to become the new way to promote sponsorships during TV shows, but it’s hit-and-miss as products without clear and obvious labels or subtle products like jewelry or clothing aren’t always easily identified.

Utvee.com is stepping in to try to fill that void.  Based in San Francisco, the website marries user tagging with TV.  The site was founded by Arnon Kohavi.

Professional taggers, hired by Utvee, identify the clothing, jewelry, and other products within a show (usually aiming for the show’s demographic), linking them to online stores such as Amazon.  Kohavi says that in the future, the paid professionals will be supplemented by users who, upon correctly identifying products, will be included in a share of the affiliate revenue generated by clicks on the site.

The idea is a good one, though the vast majority of TV watchers aren’t doing so from the Web.  It is a good example of how the future of television might look, with interactive digital television through your cable, satellite, or a TiVO-like box could marry television with the Web for instant-click information.

Imagine watching a show on the television, seeing something that you want to know more about, and clicking on it to have it load in a picture-in-picture box, on your PC, or your smart phone so you can look it up?  Commercial breaks, as we know them, may become a thing of the past.

Utvee is definitely a possible solution for networks who are streaming online, but aren’t sure how to create revenue from those streams.  Hulu and YouTube are in competition over who will own the future of television online, but both use an advertising structure similar to traditional TV.  Utvee may be the solution to truly marry the two.

Utvee just launched earlier this month and is self-funded.

There are apps and product suites meant to optimize your website for SEO, for perfecting marketing strategies, and even for semantic content.  Now, Wingify.com claims to be an all-in-one suite that combines a top-down analysis of a website to make it convert browsers into buyers at a better rate.

Conversion rates aren’t anything new, of course.  They’re the base numbers that most webrepreneurs use to calculate ROI and expected incomes for business proposals.  What Wingify aims to do is make those numbers bigger by showing you how to optimize your site’s appeal and conversion rates.

The app basically combines several smaller apps that, individually, do one part of the overall testing.  A split testing, a behavioral targeting, a visitor segmenting, a semantic targeting, and a web analytics/funnel analysis app each do their thing through Wingify.  The results are combined to show you, in one place, an integrated set of steps you can take to modify your site for maximum conversions.

Wingify just launched in October and claims that pre-launch clients saw a 50-90% increase in conversion rates, lowering their total marketing costs by 10-20% (higher conversions mean fewer eyeballs needed, which means less marketing).

The best part about Wingify is that all of these analytic tools are in one location and can be installed at the same time.  Marketing people know that quite often, it requires a full time staff to do proper analytics like those done by Wingify, and can take weeks to complete with any returns being seen.

Although the changes aren’t overnight, it’s possible to make some serious headway into increasing your conversion rates in less than two weeks with Webify.

Installing Wingify is easy: one line of javascript on your site pages and its done.  The real work comes in setting up Wingify itself, through their Web app.  You can conduct four serious tests, each of which will give you some great feedback on their own, but combined they can give you a lot of input worth having.

With A/B Split Testing, you can test variants of your ads, text, color schemes, etc. to see which gets better results.  These are mainly focused on “buy” or “checkout” type buttons for the quick sale, but also on the product listing or page itself.

Using Multivariate Testing, more elements of the page can be tested to show you which ones, combined, are bringing the best results.  This is sort of a larger scheme of the A/B split.

Product Pricing Tests are exactly what they seem: the price is varied within your parameters to see which price attracts the most buyers.  It’s not always the lowest one, many marketers know, it’s the one that seems (somehow) to be the most appealing that gets the sale.

Finally, the old standby of Landing Page Optimization is also included, which does a sort of Multivariate on individual landing pages, but focuses on SEO with the mix.

There are other capabilities as well, but with Wingify, those are the big four that most of the focus is on. Others, such as Dynamic Mashups, Behavioral Targeting, and Semantic Targeting are mostly mixed in with the Testing items already listed.

The price tag for all of this depends on the size and scope of your project.  They start at $500 (one time fee) and go up.  You’re not just buying access to the app, though.  You’re getting a team of people who use the app to analyze and give feedback for your site.

Wingify is a Delhi-based startup that launched publicly in October.

The Internet has been busy revolutionizing how we communicate, disseminate information, and more.  This has meant big changes in almost every industry.  The biggest changes are happening in the traditional news media, however, where yesterday’s business model is no longer relevant.

TeamStream.com is a project by the people behind WotNews (formerly Plugger) who’ve been working with semantic technology for search.  The plan behind TeamStream is to take what they’ve learned with WotNews (and its sister sites like CelebrityHunted) and make a sustainable business model for news.

Aimed at the corporate market, TeamStream is a collaborative news reading platform.  Using semantic search and social technologies, the service collects news from the around the Web, which is indexed and searched in near-real-time by the user.

Daily feeds based on subject, source, etc. can be built by each user, who receives them and can read and share within their collaborative team.

So an organization can then use and disseminate news inside itself as needed, skipping the fluff of irrelevant news and keeping shared news private within the company (no Facebook or Twitter here).  The sharing includes annotation and alert statuses to mark importance and ad commentary.

Basically, where WotNews is a single-user news source, TeamStream is a collaborative one.  Founder and Lead Programmer Stephen Phillips of TeamStream says that they noticed several people from the same organizations (by IP or email address) using WotNews and its sister sites simultaneously.

Phillips guessed that they were collaborating through other networks and probably not very effectively.  He saw the opportunity to provide tools to do that within the WotNews system and the idea for TeamStream grew from there.

For organizations that need instant news that they can collaborate on (say blog networks), TeamStream seems to fit the bill perfectly. It is currently in beta until December 1, when it will move to a paid service.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook, Inc. took steps to change corporate stock control, separating their stock into two classes.  The dual-class structure gives founder Mark Zuckerberg more voting power as the CEO and gives other current shareholders the same.

The move to create a dual-class stock is a common corporate solidification strategy before offering up an initial public offering (IPO).  Tech Trader Daily thinks this is exactly what the Silicon Valley social media company is planning to do.

Facebook’s official reason for dual-classification of their stock is to give existing shareholders more control over voting on certain issues.  The question is, why would they do this unless they think their voting power might be subjected to outside influence?  As in with a big influx of new voters, like an IPO would bring?

Another option could be a new influx of investment, but it’s unlikely an investor would be willing to put money in for sub-standard stock if the company is not publicly-traded.

Facebook denies any plans to go public, with Zuckerberg stating that this change “should not be construed to signal the company is planning to public.”

If Facebook is planning a stealth IPO, to be announced at the last minute, they are doing so next to fellow Silicon Valley startup Tesla Motors, who announced this week a similar change in corporate structure which most believe means an initial public offering will come soon.  Tesla is headed by Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal (now owned by eBay).

No analysis of what an IPO would begin trading at is forthcoming, but with The Telegraph reporting a few days ago that Facebook’s value has risen to $9.5 billion, it would be quite the lively stock.

The Google Knows...

The Web is aTwitter with talk about the possible deal that Microsoft is negotiating with News Corp (one of the world’s largest news agencies) to bring exclusivity of news to Big M’s rival to Google: Bing.

It’s a pretty signature Microsoft move, really.  They’ve done it several times in the past, buying, pre-empting, or outright bullying into non-existence their rivals as the Seattle Giant vies for ownership of every sector it competes in.  This deal would have MS paying News Corp (owner of the Wall Street Journal, The Sun, and more) to de-list themselves and block Google’s indexing, making Bing the all-but-exclusive search outlet for News Corp’s sites.

Other, quiet talks are also said to be pending, with the Financial Times reporting that Microsoft may be approaching other big online publishers with the same proposition.

These deals aren’t new, of course.  Rumors have been going around for over a week regarding this and Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates have been talking before about similar deals.  Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan doesn’t think that this deal would make much of a difference to the Web anyway.  The Web being, well, a web, can’t be dammed off or bottlenecked in a traditional sense.  He points out that he learned about a recent WSJ article not through Google, but through a tweet.

What everyone from Microsoft to News Corp and all the rest are jealous of, it seems, is the fat profit margins that Google shows.  Google literally has no overhead for its content.  Everything it indexes, it gets for free.  It’s only costs are the tools required to do the indexing.  In dollars and cents, those tools aren’t cheap, but in terms of percentages, they are almost free.

Further, what Microsoft and News Corp seem to be ignoring is the one facet of Google that they can’t stop with their old-mode thinking: innovation.  Google’s primary asset is its ability to innovate and build solutions to get around problems.

If MS and NC do pen this deal and suddenly the WSJ is off limits to Google, what is to stop Google from indexing tweets that include links to the WSJ?  Or from indexing Bing itself?  Or using some other trick to get around the blockade?

Information is always disseminated, no matter how hard people try to stop it.  With the Internet as an enabler, this is even more so and in near real-time quite often.  When hackers hit the Hadley Climate Centre in the UK last week, it was all over the ‘Net within hours.  The main stream media didn’t pick it up for days.  This happens all the time.

So how is blocking Google from the Wall Street Journal going to hurt anyone but the WSJ?

The video conferencing application and service, LifeSize Communications, was a privately held company in Austin, Texas.  Boasting more than 9,000 clients across 80 countries, the site’s high definition (HD) video conferencing caught the eye of Logitech International (SIX:LOGN, NDQ:LOGI).

In a cash purchase, Logitech acquired LifeSize for $405 million, marking the company as one of many that Redpoint Ventures, a venture capital firm heavily involved in LifeSize, has sold at profit recently.  Despite the economic downturn and slow investment climate, Redpoint has successfully made strong exits for several portfolio companies, including Kazeon, WiChorus, and Tellabs.  On average they look for a company that will give them 8x or more on their initial investment.  Although they wouldn’t disclose the exact return on their investment, “we are happy with our results here”, Jeff Brody of Redpoint Ventures said.

Talking with Jeff Brody of Redpoint Ventures, he made it clear that they had been with LifeSize as an investment because of its innovative use of technology.  They found Lifesize to be a meeting replacement tool.

“LifeSize is in video conferencing”, Brody said.  “They connect businesses for meeting replacements.  It started with Picturetel, which was pretty basic and hard to use, but soon built Telepresence using H264, which was a major improvement over MPEG2.”

LifeSize’s major competition for the past six years has been Go2Meeting and similar sites.  Brody feels that the H264 video compression is superior, giving high video compression without losing data.

Logitech, for their part, was enthusiastic about the buy.  Gerald P. Quindlen, Logitech’s President and CEO, said “We expect this acquisition to enable Logitech to extend our leadership in video communication beyond the desktop.  Together we can make life-like, HD-quality video communications as mainastream and seamless as a telephone..”

That statement makes it clear what Logitech plans and why acquiring LifeSize (and their technology patents) is important to them.

Given Logitech’s market focus, the technology behind LifeSize as well as the hardware and services that Logitech currently provides are a seamless match.  In a briefing on November 11, at Logitech’s Analyst and Investor Day, they said as much when explaining the acquisition to their shareholders.

Logitech is based in Switzerland and plans to keep the Austin-based LifeSize in Texas as a separate entity from the parent company.  LifeSize expected revenues of $90 million for CY2009 and growth of 40-60% for 2010.

Redpoint Ventures is based in Los Angeles, CA and has a portfolio of 60 companies mixed into 3 funds.  They have invested as little as $200,000 into startups and as much as $50 million into operating companies.