Tech Talk: Startup of the week

Equating a digital device with human qualities is nothing new. Experiments in the 1990s found that people ascribed human traits to computers when interacting with them.

By ARIEL SHAPIRA
Gil Becker AnyClip CEO (photo credit: ANYCLIP)
Gil Becker AnyClip CEO
(photo credit: ANYCLIP)
Every business owner knows how hard it is to make a video that describes your product or service. It’s a hard, long process in which you need to think about what effect you want to have on the viewer, who’s going to produce it and how much money you plan on spending to make it.
Once your ad is finally made, the most important thing is to make sure that your prospective audiences actually get to view the video. But how does one go about making that happen? How can you make ensure your video gets screened on the appropriate channels and at the correct frequency? And specifically, how can a low-budget startup make sure it reaches its target audience without falling prey to fraudsters and shady ad brokers.
One solution is AnyClip Media, a leading startup in video ad-tech that developed tracking tools to ensure that mobile video ads get placed on relevant websites. Last summer, the company raised $21 million from Roman Abramovich’s Ervington Investments and Limelight Networks, as well as from previous investors Jerusalem Venture Partners and GTI.
AnyClip’s new tracking technology is broken down into three categories: transparency, integrity and durability.
“We’ve created something unique,” AnyClip CEO Gil Becker said. “There are companies that distribute premium video contents and others that distribute advertisements. But there are almost no companies that know how to integrate these two in such a highly technological way.
Almost everyone just clicks on ‘skip ad,’ but that’s only because the ads mean nothing to them.
“Instead of looking for ways to get people to watch boring ads that pop up when they’re waiting to watch a video, we need to find a way to combine advertising with the actual content people are watching online. In fact, in surveys that we’ve conducted, when ads are intertwined with content, viewers are twice as likely to watch the ad.”
“Today, companies invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in Internet ads with a very short shelf life,” he said. “Also, these ads are usually directed at a very specific audience but are not aimed at the general public. Even if an ad has very high performance at the beginning, viewers are not interested in viewing it more than two or three times... Each time we detect a drop in an ad’s performance, we insert a new ad to bring back viewers’ interest. Our ability to combine advertising and targeted content is a complete game changer.”
Smartphones: Our new best friend An experiment that was conducted by the universities of Würzburg and Nottingham Trent on behalf of Kaspersky Lab asked participants to rate various people and objects in their lives in order of importance. The results show that smartphones may in the future overtake friends in importance.
Among the findings: • 37.4 percent of participants rate their smartphone as more, or equally, important as their close friends; • 29.4% said their smartphone was equally important, or more important, to them than their parents; • 21.2% said their smartphone was equal to, or more important, than their partner; • 16.7% rated their smartphone in the highest- importance category, although only 1.1% said their smartphone was more important than anything else in their life.
Despite the value placed on devices as a source of entertainment, information and data storage, participants in another experiment were more than happy to share their smartphone PIN number when asked, exposing access to all their personal and sensitive information. Ninety-three percent of participants gave away the PIN when asked.
Equating a digital device with human qualities is nothing new. Experiments in the 1990s found that people ascribed human traits to computers when interacting with them. (This was reported on usa.kaspersky.com.)
If you run a young startup, have developed an interesting app or have a question, please feel free to contact info@social-wisdom.com.
Translated by Hannah Hochner.