In fact, the most noteworthy thing was that CBS seemed to have been unable to sell all of its commercial slots. Especially towards the end of the game, I noticed that every other commercial was for CBS’ own shows, like NCIS and CSI and whatever other acronymed series the network has. My hypothesis about a possible cause? Social media. Seems like even the big corporations with the cash on hand to buy multimillion-dollar 30-second spots have begun to realize that social media marketing may have a greater impact on market share and “mind share” than even commercials during the most-watched television broadcast ever.

Case in point: While Coca-Cola still bought their standard slots for the Super Bowl, Pepsi decided to skip its Super Bowl commercials for the first time in 23 years, and instead invest the money in social media-related marketing. Comments from Larry Woodward, president and CEO of ad agency Vigilante, were likely similar to Pepsi’s reasoning:

“As television viewership has gone down, Internet usage, particularly social media interaction, has increased… in the important 18-34 demographic, a whopping 85 percent use social media (texting, blogging or social networking), and the phenomenal growth of social media has the attention of every major company.”

If CBS cannot even fill up advertising slots for an event has always drawn more than 80 million viewers for ~20 years, then a shift in corporate thinking about marketing really has begun!

Source: Picture from the San Francisco Chronicle.

First, the search giant is bringing out a beautiful, sleek new Android phone, the Nexus One, built to its specifications. Second, it has decided to offer the new phone—and future models—to consumers directly, unlocked, via the Web, and then invite multiple carriers to compete to sell service plans and subsidized versions of the hardware.

So what does this mean? What we’re getting here is not just the introduction of new hardware to compete with the iPhone and BlackBerry, but also the advent of a new way of doing business in mobile telecom, without contracts and subsidies. Of course, it’s not like unlocked phones have never been seen before, but even so, this push by the Google giant is sure to make waves.

Have you ever wanted to send a short message through spoken word but didn’t have the time or hardware to make a recording, transfer a file to your computer, and upload online? Google Translate’s existing text-to-speech functionality from last month’s update enables you to do just that.

All you need to do is to put your own text in this url: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=text. For example, http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=i+love+christmas gives you “I Love Christmas.”

As you can imagine, this capability can be both useful as well as comedic. Unfortunately, the only language for speech output seems to be English for the time being, but imagine the usefulness of an updated Google Translate that can output custom audio for exactly what you want to say, in whatever language you choose. Could be amazing for travel as well as for those in the process of practicing for high school Spanish or French oral exams. We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, have fun with this new use for Google Translate, and happy holidays from SocentVC!

The thing about Chrome OS is that essentially, you essentially don’t have desktop apps anymore. The Chrome OS will operate essentially like a browser; specifically, Google’s Chrome browser. To boil it down:

In Chrome OS every application is a web application. There are no native applications. That gives us simplicity. It’s just a browser with a few modifications. And all data is Chrome OS is in the cloud. This is key, we want all of personal computing to work this way. If you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works.

Sounds pretty groundbreaking, if you ask me! Although… as of this point in time, I don’t feel like this model is going to be applicable to full-performance laptops and desktops, or enterprise-level setups, which are rather complex and require compatibility with existing hardware and software. What does sound like a huge opportunity, however, is in the netbook market, which I’ve been reading a lot about lately since I’ve been searching for one myself.

The Netbook Factor
Why might Chrome OS be a game changer for netbooks? First of all, because netbooks are by nature lower-performance machines, a super-light operating system like Chrome OS won’t suffer in the way that Windows Vista or Windows 7 might. When you’re only working with an Intel Atom N270 or N280, having an operating system that runs perfectly on low performance specs is a godsend.

But wait, there’s more! Here’s the part that I find very interesting–TechCrunch claims that Chrome OS will drive netbook prices below the $199 mark. Nuts!! Netbook prices these days are already super-affordable, but have you ever wondered why netbook prices aren’t even lower? It’s because of the Microsoft tax! The what??? The Microsoft tax, alternatively known as the Windows tax, is the “small cost manufacturers pay for OEM licenses,” and the argument is that it may very will disappear basically disappear now that Chrome OS is available.

For manufacturers of netbooks, the fastest growing segment of the laptop market, this is a a double bonus. In one operating system, they get two boosts:

1. An OS that doesn’t move at the pace of a snail on slower netbook hardware, and
2. Emancipation from the Microsoft tax

PCMag says that nearly 38 million netbooks will be sold by the end of 2009. For 2010, an estimated 35 million netbooks will be sold. Now, Chrome OS won’t actually be shipped for maybe another year, so by that time, we might be talking about a market of 40 million. This is a not-insignificant amount of sales, so it should be interesting how everything shakes out. Has Google planted a ticking time bomb at Microsoft headquarters? We’ll see!

For those interested, here’s a super-simple video, one that even grandma can understand (My apologies if you are a tech-savvy grandma):

For those who want a preview of the actual Chrome OS user interface, go here: