Financial Industry: web internet marketing

Live Matrix covers a wide range of topics and formats. Unlike services like Clicker (which aims to be the TV Guide for online video), Live Matrix is format agnostic. As long as an event is scheduled, the service will index it, no matter whether it is a live video, text chat, sale, auction, product launch or a World of Warcraft tournament. As long as the event is online, it is eligible to be indexed on the site.

A TV Guide for the Scheduled Web

Earlier this week, Live Matrix's co-founders Sanjay Reddy and Nova Spivack gave us a brief demo of the service and while looking at the product, the comparison to TV Guide came up a number of times. Given that some of the core team members - including Reddy and the company's vice president of engineering Edgar Fereira - have actually worked for TV Guide in the past, this comparison is only natural. The site itself also plays on this connection, with a grid-like layout that is clearly reminiscent of TV Guide and similar online and print products.

When we first looked at the service ahead of its private beta earlier this year, we described it as "the live web's first programming guide" and as far as we can see, it is still the only service of its kind.

For the most part, Live Matrix compiles its schedule with the help of its own web crawler, but a number of services, including ESPN and eBay also provide the company with direct access to their schedules. In one of the next iterations of the tool, users will also be able to submit their own events.

Reminders

Just giving users a schedule is one thing, but without reminders, most people will likely forget about future events. Because of this, Live Matrix made reminders one of the central features of the service. Not only can you create email reminders on the site itself, but Live Matrix also provides publishers and event hosts with a reminder widget for their own sites. Live Matrix plans to add text message alerts in the future and the team is also thinking about adding push alerts to a Live Matrix mobile app in the future. Soon, Reddy and Spivack told us, you will also be able to check in at the time you are attending an event.

Filling a Niche

There can be little doubt that Live Matrix fills a need that, due to the proliferation of live video and other scheduled events on the Web, could turn out to be a very lucrative market for the company. In the long run, the team also hopes to create a kind of Nielsen rating for live events and offer companies predictive analytics for scheduled events so that live video producers, for example, can plan their bandwidth capacity accordingly.

For users, Live Matrix succeeds in making previously hard to find events easily discoverable. For event hosts, this new service offers a new marketing avenue and a chance to drive more traffic to their sites. Thanks to the reminder widget, which will probably become quite popular among news organizations and bloggers, you will surely see a lot more of Live Matrix in the future - even if you don't regularly go to the site itself.

Live Matrix Demo from Doug Freeman on Vimeo.

Internet Explorer 9 Beta made its debut earlier this month and was met with warm reception by our customers and partners. As we have talked about previously, one of the ways we measure success for IE is through customers choosing our latest product offerings. This month that means we get to expand our usage share conversation to include the Internet Explorer 9 Beta.

Net Applications’ browser usage share report released today shows IE9 Beta usage share at 0.25% for the two weeks after launch. The tech enthusiast community is observing a notable increase in IE9 activity: LiveSide reported IE9 Beta users accounted for 25% of their reader base, IE9 overtook IE6 users at DownloadSquad, and Network World reported poll results showing 47% of people intend to try IE9 Beta. Additionally, we saw tweets from the likes of Ed Bott who noticed, “Halfway through Day 1 of IE9 availability, 8% of my ZDNet visitors are using the beta. Steady increase all day, higher than IE7.”

Over the past few months we’ve discussed Internet Explorer 8’s prominence worldwide. Following earlier trends, IE8 continued its growth this month, making our browser usage share growth 0.57% for our current offerings (IE8 and IE9) in September. We are pleased to report that customers are choosing more modern browsers, as evident by the continued decline of IE6 and IE7 usage (drops of 0.63% and 0.50% respectively in September according to Net Applications). This is goodness for the industry as a whole.

Two weeks after IE9 Beta launch, we continue to see great reactions from our customers. As of today, IE9 Beta has been downloaded 6 million times, which is two and half times what we saw with IE8 Beta in a similar timeframe. Plus, a great many users are researching and testing the new features in IE9 with over 30 million page views to the Beauty of the Web site.

We look forward to seeing more and more people enjoy a beautiful web with IE9.

Ryan Gavin

Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing

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