The Cloud Is Down; NY Times Reports Q1, Paywall Stats; Display Kool-Aid

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The Cloud Goes Down

Are you affected? An outage of Amazon’s EC2 cloud hosting services, which powers serving for such companies as Foursquare and Quora, is leaving consumers and customers alike S.O.L. The Next Web provides coverage and says, “[Amazon’s EC2] status dashboard currently shows problems with the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Relational Database Service operations, based in North Virginia, with connectivity issues confirmed.” Sounds scary to me. Read more on The Next Web.

NY Times Reports, Paywall Stats

Yesterday, The New York Times reported its earnings for Q1 2011 as all eyes look to how the newspaper can survive and also create a prosperous, digital future. The company said it made just north of $5 million for the quarter and revenue slipped slightly compared to Q1 2010 at $566 million. Also for the quarter, according to the NY Times, “Digital advertising across the company grew 4.5 percent. As a percentage of the company’s total advertising revenue, digital was 28 percent, up from 25.6 percent a year earlier.” Paywall stats included that 100,000 subscribers had signed up for the company’s new digital subscriptions in the paywall’s first three weeks of existence. So, once introductory rates fade away for digital at NYT, that’s between $1.5 million ($15/month for the least expensive digital subscription) and $3.5 million per month ($35/month for the most expensive) -or between $4.5 million and $10.5 million for a calendar quarter. It’s a beginning. Read more in the NYT. Read the earnings release. And, listen to a replay of the webcast.

Display Ad Kool-Aid

Yahoo! vp of product development, Bobby Figueroa, authors a piece on MediaPost and serves up some data-driven Kool-aid for readers, “The display advertising industry has been awaiting its creative revolution for years — and this year, it’s finally on the verge of breaking through.” Read “2011: The Year Of Display Advertising.”

Personal DMP

Last week, entrepreneur Tara Hunt writes on O’Reilly’s “big data”-focused blog that people are going to need to get used to the idea of the relatively free-flow of personal data in the future. In fact, she says, “I’m looking forward to the day that personal data collection is part of the popular vernacular. Until then, it is up to us — the geeks and developers of theses applications — to help people collect these moments so they receive real-time value.” It’s the personal DMP! Read more.

Groupon Grabs Googler

More poaching stories! Kara Swisher reports that Google vp of global sales ops, Margo Georgiadis, has “left the builidng” and will become the COO of Groupon. Swisher notes that a former Yahoo! had been in the COO role until late March. Read more.

Privacy By Gender

In preparation for an upcoming conference, data and measurement firm Nielsen reveals data from a recent survey of “app” users as it relates to online privacy and revealing one’s location (a la Foursquare) – and gender. The study finds, “This concern is more pronounced among women app downloaders, with 59 percent reporting they have privacy concerns compared to 52 percent of male app downloaders.” See the nice graphics.

Talent Crunch Or -Jobs A-Go-Go

USA Today reports on a talent crunch in technology-related companies. USA Today’s Jon Swartz quotes Shane Greenstein of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who says, “Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists foresee growth in wireless apps, online gaming and clean tech, he says. ‘It is not a classic tech boom, led by a big new opportunity like (Internet) browsing or Web 2.0, but a mixture of a few big and unrelated trends.” Read more.

Still More Data

Data management and exchange platform company BlueKai announced a new feature courtesy of its Track Simple acquisition which “adds to its existing media dashboard that allows users to aggregate campaign data from top media partners.” Now clients can see DoubleClick, Google Adwords, Facebook, MSN and Google Analytics data all in the same place. Read the release.

Publishers Buy With DSPs

Media management consultant David Ambrose is advising publishers to start buying on demand-side platforms (DSPs). He writes on MediaPost, “The advent of DSPs has made it easier for a publisher bundle a really large solution for a client; one that includes its own inventory and special content/community solutions that address the highest value needs of a marketer, AND additional inventory purchased off an exchange.” Read more.

But Wait. There’s More!