Back in the early Web 1.0 days of the “Interactive Agency,” it was pretty safe to say that you only had to know how to do a couple things really well– build websites and create banner ad campaigns. Then, throw in some shotgun email marketing and a few extranets and you could build a business. To give props to the early pioneers — Organic, Agency.com, Sapient, US Web/CKS, APL Digital, iXL, Red Sky, and others — they were the few, the proud, the digital natives.

These days, as digital platforms, widgets and technologies multiply, that which defines what an “interactive agency” is has become a sum of many moving parts. Say you’re considering changing interactive agencies. The list of services you might require alone can be daunting, and can involve…

Strategy:

* Do they offer digital branding capabilities?
* Do they offer online research or do they outsource it?
* Do they have online brand strategists?

Tactic– do they have expertise in:

* Search (SEO/SEM)
* Behavioral Targeting
* Creative Optimization
* Site Building and Maintenance?

Technology:

* What are their technology capabilities?
* Do they author in all programs?
* Do they have expertise in targeted email marketing?
* Viral applications?
* Broadband video?
* Do they work in Mobile/Wireless?
* On Demand?
* Digital Out of Home?

Start with your objectives and goals.
You get the point– this interactive media stuff is hard. And there’s a lot to consider in choosing a partner.

My advice is to start with your customer segments and brand objectives and then work outward from there. The digital marketing continuum is growing by the day, so if you can start by focusing on your specific goals — be it brand awareness, trial, lead generation, purchase, word of mouth, et cetera… the list of specific capabilities you need in the near term will likely steer you to the right partners to get off on the right foot.

Remember, no interactive agency, ours included, is best of breed in every digital discipline. The trick is to identify the capabilities you really need instead of overpaying for infrastructure or a name that’s 10 miles wide but only a few inches deep in each capability.

Might you need more than one interactive agency?
It depends.

If the name of your game is integration and simplicity, then you’re likely to buy a bigger, full service shop and fall somewhere on their client roster. The question is to identify where they really excel. If rich, luxurious brand sites is what you’re seeking, then go where the gold awards for site development are. Whereas, if you’re looking to move beyond the banner and create campaigns that leverage broadband video through custom short and long form video spots and contextual pre-rolls, you might also need a more specialized kind of interactive creative partner.

There’s much more to measure.
Once you get past the interactive media and creative partners, you’ve got to consider how you’ll measure your new agencies’ success:

* In ideas?
* In service?
* In process?
* In business results?
* In cost?
* In collaboration with your other agency partners?

There’s a lot to measuring success in choosing today’s Interactive Agency because there are so many moving parts. But if you’re crystal clear about your goals going in, then the right capabilities, creativity and chemistry are just a short list away.

Alan Schulman is Chief Creative Officer of Brand New World.

We saw this coming but are not at all worried, we are playing with the big boys now!

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Jaxtr, a Silicon Valley startup that lets users bypass a carrier’s international phone charges via the Web, said on Wednesday it is offering free mobile phone text messages between 38 countries.

Jaxtr members can use a simple Web form to send a text message to a mobile phone in any of the supported countries, which include the United States, Brazil and Britain as well as Kenya, Slovenia and Ukraine.

The recipient can reply directly with their mobile phone, or click on a link, sign up to Jaxtr and send a free reply through their mobile phone’s Web browser.

“We’re opening up the service — until now Jaxtr has been a member service, you couldn’t call me unless I was a member … with (messaging) we’re opening it up for the first time,” Jaxtr Chief Executive Konstantin Guericke told Reuters.

Jaxtr is one of dozens of companies to emerge in recent years that use Web technology as a substitute for more costly proprietary network services that telecom carriers offer to their customers.

Guericke said that unlike Skype, a unit of online auctioneer eBay Inc which competes directly with telecom carriers because its users can bypass traditional phone networks, Jaxtr is less of a threat because it requires all its users to have a phone to receive calls and text messages.

“Carriers are looking at what’s happening with social networks … They are a little concerned that everything will be just people sending e-mails to each other, or Facebook messages,” he said.

Text messages will include a small ad — a source of revenue for Jaxtr — and the service is also meant to entice users to return to Jaxtr’s Web site more often, which will also generate advertising income, Guericke said.

“If you want to have a service that is widespread, the only way to get it out there is to provide something that people want to share with their friends. That’s the only way you can grow very rapidly,” Guericke said, adding Jaxtr had already attracted 10 million users, mostly outside the United States.

The company plans to employ a model used by many Web firms with a basic service that is free and advertising-supported, and premium services for a fee. It does not yet offer paid-for services.

Jaxtr is working with wholesalers such as iBasis, majority owned by Dutch telecoms group KPN, to provide its service.

(Reporting by Niclas Mika; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Skype uses PostgreSQL as their backend database. PostgreSQL doesn’t get enough run in the database world so I was excited to see how PostgreSQL is used “as the main DB for most of [Skype's] business needs.” Their approach is to use a traditional stored procedure interface for accessing data and on top of that layer proxy servers which hash SQL requests to a set of database servers that actually carry out queries. The result is a horizontally partitioned system that they think will scale to handle 1 billion users.

# Skype’s goal is an architecture that can handle 1 billion plus users. This level of scale isn’t practically solvable with one really big computer, so our masked superhero horizontal scaling comes to the rescue.
# Hardware is dual or quad Opterons with SCSI RAID.
# Followed common database progression: Start with one DB. Add new databases partitioned by functionality. Replicate read-mostly data for better read access. Then horizontally partition data across multiple nodes..
# In a first for this blog anyway, Skype uses a traditional database architecture where all database access is encapsulated in stored procedures. This allows them to make behind the scenes performance tweaks without impacting frontend servers. And it fits in cleanly with their partitioning strategy using PL/Proxy.
# PL/Proxy is used to scale the OLTP portion of their system by creating a horizontally partitioned cluster:

- Database queries are routed by a proxy across a set of database servers. The proxy creates partitions based on a field value, typically a primary key.
- For example, you could partition users across a cluster by hashing based on user name. Each user is slotted into a shard based on the hash.
- Remote database calls are executed using a new PostgreSQL database language called plproxy. An example from Kristo Kaiv’s blog:

First, code to insert a user in a database:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION insert_user(i_username text) RETURNS text AS $$
BEGIN
PERFORM 1 FROM users WHERE username = i_username;
IF NOT FOUND THEN
INSERT INTO users (username) VALUES (i_username);
RETURN ‘user created’;
ELSE
RETURN ‘user already exists’;
END IF;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql SECURITY DEFINER;

Heres the proxy code to distribute the user insert to the correct partition:
queries=#
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION insert_user(i_username text) RETURNS TEXT AS $$
CLUSTER ‘queries’; RUN ON hashtext(i_username);
$$ LANGUAGE plproxy;

Your SQL query looks normal:
SELECT insert_user(“username”);

- The result of a query is exactly that same as if was executed on the remote database.
- Currently they can route 1000-2000 requests/sec on Dual Opteron servers to a 16 parition cluster.
# They like PL/Proxy approach for OLTP because:
- PL/Proxy servers form a scalable and uniform “DB-bus.” Proxies are robust because in a redundant configuration if one fails you can just connect to another. And if the proxy tier becomes slow you can add more proxies and load balance between them.
- More partitions can be added to improve performance.
- Only data on a failed partition is unavailable during a failover. All other partitions operate normally.
# PgBouncer is used as a connection pooler for PostgreSQL. PL/Proxy “somewhat wastes connections as it opens connection to each partition from each backend process” so the pooler helps reduce the number of connections.
# Hot-standby servers are created using WAL (Write Ahead Log) shipping. It doesn’t appear that these servers can be used for read-only operations.
# More sophisticated organizations often uses an OLTP database system to handle high performance transaction needs and then create seperate systems for more non-transactional needs. For example, an OLAP (Online analytical processing) system is often used for handling complicated analysis and reporting problems. These differ in schema, indexing, etc from the OLTP system. Skype also uses seperate systems for the presentation layer of web applications, sending email, and prining invoices. This requires data be moved from the OLTP to the other systems.
- Initially Slony1 was used to move data to the other systems, but “as the complexity and loads grew Slony1 started to cause us greater and greater pains.”
- To solve this problem Skype developed their on lighter weight queueing and replication toolkit called SkyTools.

The proxy approach is interesting and is an architecture we haven’t seen previously. Its power comes from the make another level of indirection school of problem solving, which has advantages:
# Applications are independent of the structure of the database servers. That’s encapsulated in the proxy servers.
# Applications do not need to change in response to partition, mapping, or other changes.
# Load balancing, failover, and read/write splitting are invisible to applications.

The downsides are:
# Reduced performance. Another hop is added and queries must be parsed to perform all the transparent magic.
# Inability to perform joins and other database operations across partitions.
# Added administration complexity of dealing with proxy configuration and HA for the proxy servers.

It’s easy to see how the advantages can outweigh the disadvantages. Without changing your application you can slip in a proxy layer and get a lot of very cool features for what seems like a low cost. If you are a MySQL user and this approach interests you then take a look at MySQL Proxy, which accomplishes something similar in a different sort of way.

https://developer.skype.com/SkypeGarage/DbProjects/SkypePostgresqlWhitepaper

I have in the recent past come to see that people will anything for a quick especially when they think they have you hoodwinked to thinking that they have performed as per agreements.We had engaged a firm to helps in the collation of a local content directory for our allwoman brand. The gist of the task was to research on topics along various lines of interest to the East African woman and create and or modify existing content (from the numerous article database) for the east african lady populace.

The task would be done and the articles availed for publishing. On receipt of the articles it was realized that they were outrightly plagiarized and would result in copyright infringements of the original authors. Interestingly, they are still demanding payment for the non original plagiarized articles and even threatening legal redress.Surely…apat from the fact that we are deeply disappointed and the articles are of no use to us, i am angered at the continued insistence on payment, all the while forgetting that we are in the content space and can easily find the source of the said articles.

That said however, we have asked on public forums like Facebook for users to submit their personal stories and we start from there building a user generated database of content.Sop far we have three female writers contributing and recruiting their pals to write about things going on in their lives. This is a much better approach…