Hello Marketers! HP May Head To Software Business Model; AudienceScience's Hirsch Exits

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

HP Changing Its Business

HP may drop its computer business and get into software. Can addressing media and the marketer be far behind? The New York Times reports that HP is in talks to potentially acquire Autonomy (see website), a business intelligence software company. The Times says, “Hewlett’s chief executive, Leo Apotheker, has said he wants to focus on higher-margin businesses like software and de-emphasize the personal computer business. Software currently accounts for about 3 percent of its revenue.” Read more. And, read Bloomberg, which originally broke the story.

AudienceScience’s Hirsch Exits

Former AudienceScience CEO and its current President, Jeff Hirsch, announced that he’ll leave the company on September 30 and pursue “pursue smaller entrepreneurial interests,” writes Kate Kaye on ClickZ. AudienceScience’s current CEO Jeff Pullen had been hired from U.S. Search over a year ago as President, COO and board member and officially took over from Hirsch as CEO in May. What will Hirsch do next? He appears to be destined for start-up land. Read more.

History Stealing And WTK

The “What They Know” series returns to the Wall Street Journal with a look at what it calls “supercookies.” The WSJ’s Julia Angwin talks to Stanford research Jonathan Mayer who had previously exposed a practice described as “history stealing” on Flixster.com and on Charter Communications Inc.’s Charter.net website. Epic Media is at the center of the storm for the tech involved. Epic’s CEO Don Mathis tells Angwin that “his company was inadvertently using the technology and no longer uses it. He said the information was used only to verify the accuracy of data that it had bought from other vendors.” Read more. In a WSJ blog post, Angwin raises concerns around the efficacy of proposed self-regulation. Read it.

Adobe Survey Capabilities

Online marketing survey companies may be looking over their shoulder as Adobe announced a new update to its Adobe Survey product. From the release, “the redesigned Adobe Survey [is] a voice-of-customer sentiment application that captures audience opinions, attitudes, and motivations in real-time, giving digital marketers a more complete understanding of consumers.” And, its integrated into the Online Marketing Suite. The Adobe stack thickens. Surveys can be especially important to brand awareness campaigns. Read more.

Dialing Up Private Equity

With Aol’s diminishing stock price (down to a $1.3 billion market cap as of yesterday), rumors are swirling that private equity firms may be looking at taking over Aol. Benchmark Capital analyst Clayton Moran tells Bloomberg, “Private equity firms will be the most compelled to acquire AOL, given that they can create a financial model based on the dial-up unit’s “manageable declining cash flow story.'” Read more.

More Transparency

Google’s Adwords buying platform is adding still more transparency for its users. On the Inside AdWords blog, the company announced “ValueTrack, a feature for those of you who use third-party tracking software or have access to your web logs. With the new additional ValueTrack parameter we’ve recently added, {adposition}, you can now see the position on the page that your ad appeared in.”
Read it.

Dismissed

interclick announced that it has rid itself of the last of the litigation from plaintiff Sonal Bose who alleged that the company’s “online advertising practices violated numerous state and federal acts.” In tweeting a link to the press release, interclick CEO Michael Katz appeared to be addressing the plaintiff’s counsel when he tweeted, “Kamber ‘I will dare interclick to find a privacy case by my firm that wound up being dismissed’ THINK I JUST FOUND ONE.” Read the release.

Long Form Video Ads

Video monetization platform FreeWheel has released its second quarter 2011 report culling the latest FreeWheel platform data. Adweek’s Anthony Crupi reports, “After analyzing 11.3 billion online video views and 6 billion ad views, FreeWheel concluded that consumers appear willing to sit through more commercials when those sponsor messages are surrounded by long-form programming.” And that could be good news for addressable TV proponents. Read more on Adweek. And, get the report on FreeWheel’s site.

Let Me Sell You Something

On his company’s blog, Upstream Group’s Doug Weaver offers his list of “7 Really Damaging Things That are Said and Done Every Day on Sales Calls.” Can you name one? If you said, “No bagels?” you might as well start reading.

You’re Hired! – or Appointed!