Assaf Henkin's 2 cents

My videos

ahenkin — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:50:06 +0000

Ned Overend and the 2008 Stumpjumper

ahenkin — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:01:18 +0000

I’m looking to buy a new mountain bike since my old Specialized Epic was stolen a few months ago (Tel Aviv is a tough place when it comes to safeguarding your bike…), and as a loyal and satisfied Specialized owner for a few years now, I’m looking to get a new Stumpjumper. Specialized are known for their R&D and development of new products and accessories that go alongside new and improved models and in recent years they have been making very good use of digital media to showcase their progress. Their web site contains several Flash animations that provide an excellent overview of why specific products are needed and how they work. Here’s a cool one about Body Geometry. They also leverage their site as a very efficient marketing tool in terms of the design and overall brand. I’m still looking for specific model / vendor / great price (that’s part of the fun) and along the way I came across this very nice video of legendary Ned Overend riding the new 2008 Stumpy:

Google at an all time high

ahenkin — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 10:21:16 +0000

On Friday Google’s stock reached a new high placing a valuation of about $175B. Hopefully the people I told not to buy the stock at $100 have already forgotten about my “brilliant” advice…

Google steps into Rich Media and Brand Advertising

ahenkin — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:20:19 +0000

Google made two very interesting announcements this week that are closely connected. One is about a new ad product that they launched – Google Gadgets- which is Google’s entry into rich media ads. Rich media ads is a general label used for ads that are usually dynamic in nature (animated gifs, flash, video, etc.) and fairly large (250×250 and above). Advertisers and agencies will be able to create such gadget ads using the Google platform and the “twist” is that these are not just regular rich media, but actually gadgets, meaning that users can interact with the ads right on the page where the ad is presented. So what’s the big deal? Well, for a company with a mission statement of organizing the world’s information, doing rich media ads is a bit far from what one would perceive as the core focus, even if they are rich media ads with a twist. Google introduced ads with the promise that they will be so relevant and useful for the user, that they will as good as information. Truth be told, Google’s search ads that appear next to the search results are useful and I find myself clicking on them quite often. I also find the AdSenseads useful at times when they match the content that I’m reading. Another move that fits very well with Google’s agency / branding strategy is the hiring of an ex-Ogilvy executive.
What does it all mean? I guess the obvious… Google needs to maintain its growth and can’t ignore the high CPMs that the brand agencies are looking to pay. In order to cater to that segment they will need to continue to create products and services that take it further away from its core mission and much closer to Madison avenue.
BTW – Amazon.com’s associates program has recently released their own gadgets that publishers can customize and place on their site.

Joel Comm’s Kontera video

ahenkin — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:07:19 +0000

I recently ran a search for “kontera” on YouTube and one of the videos that cam up was the following. If you don’t know who Joel Comm is, then you can do your own search and read more about him, but he is definitely one of the Internet’s affilaite revenue gurus. Joel has partnered with us as an affiliate.

I’m blogging

ahenkin — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 14:47:54 +0000

It took me a while, but I’m finally jumping on board. Why? Partly for work purposes (we’re trying to understand the Blog universe better) and partly since there are so many tools, gadgets, widgets (is that the same thing? ) tag clouds, etc out there that I wanted to test them in a “real world” environment. So here we go…