Facebook became the most visited site in the U.S. for the first time on Christmas, topping Google, according to research firm Hitwise. The social networking site has historically gotten a traffic spike during the holidays. (Hitwise reported that it reached an earlier all-time high on Christmas last year too.)
Still, it’s got to be a bit emboldening for the company, which sees itself as a solution for brand advertising online. While Google has nailed search advertising, or ads that are close to the point of purchase and require an action, Facebook sees itself as key to demand generation and ads that influence consumers earlier on in the buying cycle. This, by the way, is a market they estimate to be more than 10 times the size of the search ad market, according to conversations we had with the company earlier this year.
To tap that market and prove itself to large brands, Facebook needs to prove traffic and engagement. Facebook has more than doubled in size this year, surpassing 350 million users. Hitwise reported two weeks ago that Facebook was the third most visited site this year, up from ninth place in 2008. Some of Facebook’s own statistics are even scarier: the average user spends 55 minutes a day on the site.

“Government 2.0” has been a big buzzword of 2009, with thought-leaders like Tim O’Reilly and The Sunlight Foundation showing the way. It’s a movement that pushes public institutions to use technologies that have thrived in the last five years like social networking and blogging to foster closer relationships with citizens. This entails being more open with data, and encouraging regular people to transform it through mashups and apps for use by others.
A few city governments have made good on their pledges to be more transparent. San Francisco unveiled DataSF, a central clearinghouse for data collected by the city, and showcases some apps here. New York City went a step further, launching a full-on apps contest through Betaworks-backed startup ChallengePost.
It’s been almost three months since the contest launched, and several interesting applications have turned up. Here are a few, and you can check out the rest here. (To be clear, some of the data for these apps is collected through the government like with Bookzee and some of it is bootstrapped.)

Primospot: Hands down, the biggest pain of owning a car in a major metropolitan city is finding a place to park. Primospot is building a database of all parking regulations in Boston and New York, so you can figure out where you’re legally allowed to park now or in the near future. Primospot generates maps like the one above, showing what’s in the red zone and not. Primospot can also send you text messages for when your parking space is about to expire and you can search for parking in the near future (in case you’re working during the day and want to figure out where to park when you go out at night.) And, in case you don’t think it gets any better, you can also compare parking garage prices in real-time. The company just launched an iPhone app called iPark, so you can record where you’ve parked in case you forget it.
All in all, it seems like a very helpful app and one that’s sorely needed in a pu

One rather morbid consequence of sharing our lives online is the digital trail we leave behind when we die.
It’s not an idea that comes readily to the Facebook generation, but managing the profiles and blog posts left behind upon death may become a growing necessity. A Swedish startup called MyWebWill is trying to address the problem by storing passwords and people’s wishes, so that their online identities can be shut down or handed over to friends and family when they pass away.
The idea is to create a central hub, where you can plan what will happen with your web presence across all social networks and games. You can bequeath World of Warcraft armor to a friend, prepare a final tweet or automatically send an e-mail to all your Gmail contacts.
I sat down with founders Lisa Granberg and Elin Tybring in Stockholm this week and made a short video of them explaining the service below.

MyWebWill will work on a “freemium” model. The free version will simply deactivate all your accounts and then the paid version can add more customization. The user can decide if they want to clear their wall or if they want a specific final Facebook profile photo, for example.
Users with paid accounts can opt for an annual fee of 199 Swedish kronor or about $27, or a lifetime fee of 1495 kronor or about $205. When you sign up for MyWebWill, the company will store your passwords and remind you once a year to keep them updated.
Granberg said the service can tell if a person has passed away with two methods. In places like Sweden and Germany, there is a national registry that keeps track of all people living in the country and MyWebWill will cross-check their database against the national ones weekly. In countries like the U.S., they’ll need two people to act as verifiers. When you sign up, you’ll provide contact information for the verifiers and MyWebWill will contact them through e-mail explaining the service and their responsibilities. They’ll also e-mail them about once a

At the Le Web conference in Paris last week, there was a debate about whether a bright moment for tech startups in London had passed. The Bebo and Last.fm acquisitions happened almost two years ago, and several of the startups from the “Silicon Roundabout,” an area around Old Street in the East, have moved on. Travel social network Dopplr relocated to Berlin after the Nokia acquisition, for one.
But London, as always, is reinventing itself — a new 7,000 square-foot hub is taking root in Farringdon with the help of angel investors Stefan Glaenzer, who was Last.fm’s first investor and chairman, and Eileen Burbidge. White Bear Yard is home to six startups and freelancers with a very diverse body of work. There’s a gambling startup Smarkets and RjDj, which is pioneering the new field of “reactive” music. The space has come together over the last few months and Glaenzer and Burbidge haven’t formally announced it yet.
Burbidge, who was an early Skype employee, says White Bear Yard is a space where startups can learn from each other and use collective knowledge to overcome shared hurdles like recruiting, search engine optimization, financing and marketing. In fact, the entire building has good startup mojo: Mendeley, the startup dubbed the Last.fm of research papers, has the bottom floor of the building, while design consultancy Ideo (which helped create Apple’s first mouse, the first laptop, the Palm V and the Treo) has the second.
When I first dropped by late on a Friday night, engineers were still plugging away and holding scrums to track product development. Mendeley was moving boxes and tables into its new offices on the ground floor.
The teams are also just as international as they are in Silicon Valley. Location-based services startup Rummble has engineers from Italy, India, the U.K. and Russia. Burbidge says she and Glaenzer charge rent for the space, although they give preference to startups they hold equity in.
London has a few things going for

In an age when tracks can be copied or streamed at virtually no cost, what extras can musicians add to make a living?
A London- and New York-based startup called RjDj is experimenting with one answer. RjDj is taking albums from electronic artists like Little Boots and Air and creating reactive music experiences from them through iPhone apps. RjDj launched one this week with Little Boots, a British electropop artist who made her name by posting YouTube videos of herself playing experimental instruments like the Tenori-On.
What’s reactive music? It’s a type of music that’s different every single time you play it. The phone’s microphone picks up sounds from your environment while the accelerometer takes in the movement of your phone. RjDj’s app can incorporate both into the track, making each time you play a song entirely unique. The startup launched its own free app last year that offers an ever-changing variety of tracks and effects.
With the Little Boots collaboration, RjDj tooks three tracks from her already released album and turned them into a $2.99 app where you can apply effects to each song. One track focuses on accelerometer movement and sounds more agitated depending on how fast you’re walking or how much you’re shaking the phone. Another takes in sounds from your environment, like chatter from people around you in a cafe, and infuses them into the song. The effects range from being almost indetectable on some tracks to being completely transformative on others.
In the same way that sites like YouTube and social networks have handed people the tools to create experiences rather than passively consume them, RjDj is trying to allow music fans to influence the tracks they’re listening to. Fans can share unique instances of the generative Little Boots track and upload them to RJDJ’s site.
The company has also done its own take on headphone parties, where attendees listen to RjDj tracks while a person dubbed the “reality jockey” plays with

Covestor, a startup that lets people mimic other investors’ moves, is opening its doors and allowing anyone to become a portfolio manager on its investment management service. It will create many more investment options on the site for Covestor members because before, there were only 25 models that users could follow.
Becoming a manager on the site is contingent on a few conditions: you have to disclose all your real brokerage moves and share a year of performance history. Managers on Covestor can attract others to “follow” and copy their trades, while earning fees based on how many people track them or the total value of the assets they guide.
“We’re trying to bring the principles and practices of the Internet to finance and allow clients to pick what’s most appropriate for them,” said co-founder Perry Blacher. “As long as you’re willing to share your real investment activity and be transparent, then we’ll set you up with a level playing field.”
Blacher says the site has seen 50 percent growth each month over the last three months in assets under management. Covestor is part of a cohort of young startups that are trying to disrupt the traditional mutual fund industry, including MarketRiders, Cake Financial and Kaching. Mutual funds have come to manage more than $10 trillion while charging roughly 1 to 3 percent in fees every year. These startups say the industry is opaque — it’s hard to tell whether mutual funds are simply taking a share of an ever-growing pie or whether fund managers have unique skills that allow them to beat market returns. Allowing regular people to share their trading history and strategy gives consumers a transparent alternative to the mutual funds. Each of them has a slightly different approach: Kaching has a broader, more consumer-oriented focus with a lower minimum investment at $3,000 while MarketRiders is more hands-on for wealthier investors that want to watch over their portfolio allocations directly. Covestor

Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter and co-founder of a new payments startup called Square, said the company will give away its credit card-swiping devices for free at the Le Web conference in Paris today. (See a Q&A with Dorsey here.) It’s a move that should help overcome the biggest hurdle for the startup, and probably help make its money back if it can take a small share of all payments it manages.
Square is a new product that allows owners of iPhones or iPod Touches to receive credit card payments. It’s a small device that plugs in to the phone’s audio jack. You can swipe a credit card through it, and it will turn the data from card into an audio signal that an app on the phone then turns into payment information. The payer can sign their name on the phone, and receive a receipt through e-mail.
It’s an interesting product because it will let regular people from friends trying to divvy up a dinner check and small 1- or 2-person businesses process credit card payments. It’s a serious challenge to the value of carrying cash.
Dorsey said the company will release an application programming interface that will allow other developers to build apps that can tie in Square payments to a business’ inventory management system or QuickBooks.
Square is backed by angel investors and Khosla Ventures.

Daylife, a company that gives online publishers access to content from some 8,000 media sources, is making it easier to run entire sections of curated content.
The New York company, which launched in 2007,  so far has let publishers (from small web-sites to such clients as USA Today and the Washington Post) supplement their own content with third-party reporting, photos, or video. This lets publishers fill out a site without having to produce or gather their own reporting, photos, or video.
The company’s new tools make it even easier to automate the content publishing process:

SmartSections — Does your site need a section on travel? Basketball? Autism? Daylife has hundreds of prepared sections on specific topics that can be used as-is, or customized to fit into an existing site. If you can’t stand the thought of, say, a shrinkwrapped autism section on your site, you can customize your own, or adapt the existing one. My favorite is the section devoted entirely to NPR journalist / Internet space princess Xeni Jardin. There’s even one on Techmeme, allowing you to keep up on news about the popular news-about-news site. (If Techmeme links to it and the Internet implodes, don’t blame me.
SmartTopics — Another type of what publishers boringly call “content verticals” are those that focus on one narrow topic, such as Lady Gaga or — much more originally — Maine governor John Baldacci. Compared to SmartSections, these pages aren’t meant to be news streams, but rather one-stop shops for all things Baldacci. News, videos, photos, they’re all pre-posted here

Daylife, a 26-person company led by CEO Upendra Shardanand, has so far raised $15 million in funding, most recently $4 million from Getty Images. The New York-based company launched in 2007 and was originally known as NewsDB.

Introducing Daylife SmartSections from Daylife on Vimeo.

Introducing Daylife SmartTopics from Daylife on Vimeo.

Typing in search queries is so passe. Two developments from Google this month are pointing the way to a much more visual and location-centric style of search.
For starters, the company said today that it began sending out two-dimensional barcodes to more than 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. This will enable mobile phone users to snap a picture of the barcode (known as a QR code and pictured to the right) and trigger a search for the local business. Right now, the capabilities for the program are fairly basic — you can find reviews of the place, get a coupon if the business is offering one or mark the business for remembering later.
On top of owning a smartphone, a user will need to have an app that can read QR codes like the $1.99 QuickMark app for iPhones or the Barcode Scanner app for Android-based phones. Google also recommended BeeTagg and NeoReader.

The second and more distant development is a product Google is testing called Goggles. You can take a photo of a place and query Google for related information. If this were accurate, it could boost the volume of search queries dramatically. It might even make two-dimensional barcodes obsolete if you could combine accurate logo recognition and GPS coordinates to identify a business. Unfortuantely, that’s a bit far off. Google hasn’t launched it publicly although they did talk about it in a CNBC special this month embedded below.

If you’re the type of obsessive-compulsive person who needs to organize the firehose of information confronting you every day on the web, then Pearltrees might work for you. It’s a visual social bookmarking service that allows you keep track of what you’ve read and establish relationships between different pieces of content.
Using Pearltrees is like drawing a mind-map, but with online content. You can drag-and-drop content into a browser add-on or the service will automatically index links you share on Twitter. Then you can organize all of that content into a tree or a web of keywords like the picture shown above. It’s like organizing bookmarks into folders and sub-folders but in a two-dimensional space.
Other people can follow, link or add to the trees you’ve built, so there’s a social element to the site. On the back of all that data, Pearltrees is also developing algorithms to surface the most relevant or significant content as judged by the amount of branches connected to them. It is like their own equivalent of Google’s PageRank, the breakthrough approach the search giant used to mine links and return relevant results.
Pearltree’s approach involves a pretty unique user interface, and it will probably work better for people who think visually. The Twitter integration will also be a big plus, because it taps into a natural user behavior and doesn’t require any extra effort to save links the way a browser add-on might. Still, I’m skeptical that the majority of users will want to organize the old content they’ve read into trees.
Paris-based Pearltrees has raised 2.5 million euros from angel investors. They’re also pursuing a pretty tough revenue model in the form of either advertising off pearl trees or premium accounts for publishers that embed Pearltrees in content. To pull it off, they’ll either have to achieve massive scale with hundreds of thousands or millions of users or they’ll have to be a compelling enough service to publishers

Behavioral targeting engine Reedge has just launched a beta test of its service. It’s one of a number of engines that promise to help companies better target services and ads to consumers online. When a consumer waivers on buying something for example, an analysis of past users’ behavior may show that free shipping or a discount will make the sale more likely to happen quickly.
Reedge’s engine focuses on small and medium sized businesses that generate more than $5,000/month from their website. Reedge claims it can increase website conversion rates by 5-10% within the first month and that it can increase online revenue by customizing the experience for website visitors. For example, a website may offer discounted shipping for users who have visited the website three times without purchasing anything, or they can be presented with a limited-time discount.
Competitors include Omniture, Tacoda and Wunderloop but these companies focus on high-volume transaction sites. “Our system levels the playing field so smaller websites or blogs can get the kind of conversion rates that have only been possible on multi-million dollar sites with complex back-end systems,” said Reedge CEO Dennis van der Heijden. “We know we want to make a real difference for the millions of online businesses that have a good number of visitors and know they can get more out of their existing visitor base but just do not have thousands of dollars to spend on a new onsite behavioral targeting tool.” After the free beta period concludes and the system becomes available to the public, it will sell for under $100/month, with pricing scaled to match a website’s visitor volume.
Website operators only need to add some code to their sites to get started. “The SaaS tool is for everyone to try, from individuals selling a few products on their blog to medium-sized retailers with a catalog of thousands of products,” van der Heijden says.
Reedge, based in Menlo Park, Calif., will be sending out 1

Who will be the web’s primary identity platform?
Google’s trying to stay in the fight by integrating Twitter across its 9 million Friend Connect web sites. That means you can log into a Google Friend Connect site with your Twitter profile and share that new membership with your friends and along with other interesting content.
Now keep in mind that most of those 9 million member sites are part of Google Blogger, which automatically got included in the platform when it launched. This will help those sites find new audiences and promote the Friend Connect identity to others.
What’s interesting is the timing. It comes on the same day Facebook announced a massive integration with Yahoo’s properties, handing the social network an additional way to reach 500 million people. A big win. Yahoo users can use their Facebook log-ins to see what their friends are doing on its properties and share that activity back to their social network.
Google, however, doesn’t really have a large sharing platform. It has Orkut and Google Reader, but those haven’t found the same traction Twitter or Facebook has with audiences closing in on half a billion users. It also wants to prevent the growth of closed or unfriendly ecosystems. So it’s turning to Twitter in a reactive move against its emerging competitor Facebook.
But this gives Twitter and Facebook more of a duopoly on data around our identities and social relationships. Is this ultimately what we want?

HipLogic, a company that brings features and apps from smartphones to regular feature phones, just raised $7 million in a second round of financing with Bay Partners as the lead investor. Stage 1 Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Accrue Sports and Entertainment Ventures also participated in the round.
“The top 1 percent of users are buying 30 percent of applications and that’s primarily on one platform — the iPhone,” said CEO Mark Anderson. “Operators and manufacturers have a thirst for getting this content onto their platforms. The question facing us is how do you get a rich experience across multiple platforms, and open and closed systems?”
HipLogic’s technology lets users on this larger lower-tier of the market access social networking and entertainment content at a fraction of the bandwidth that’s required by other mobile browsers. HipLogic’s partners, which are operators like Verizon, can install their technology on phones or reach it through a downloadable client.
Formerly known as Numobiq, the company has 20 employees, and is using the round to expand distribution and its operations in the Americas and overseas. They just initiated a partnership with the U.K.’s Carphone Warehouse. The round brings HipLogic’s total funding to $13 million, including a first venture-backed round of $4.5 million in January of 2008.
“We want to take this really content rich application experience and bring that to mass-market devices worldwide,” Anderson said.

Augmented reality startup AcrossAir, which makes apps that help you find nearby subway stops and restaurants, turned profitable last month and is launching a bar finder this week. Augmented reality is a new field that lets you overlay 3-D graphics and information over the space around you through your phone’s viewfinder.
AcrossAir’s new app is a partnership with Stella Artois that lets you hold up your phone, pan around and see info tags superimposed over your surroundings pointing to nearby bars serving their beer. It will be a free app tracking 80,000 bars in the U.S. with Stella Artois pulling the data from their distribution database.
So how did AcrossAir start turning a profit? They rely on advertising, paid apps and partnerships like this Stella Artois deal. The company makes a number of augmented reality apps — from Nearest Tube, which helps you find subway stops, to Nearest Tweets, which shows you tweets from close by. There was also another deal to create WorkSnug, an augmented reality app that helps you find coffee shops to work in with WiFi and outlets (see a video here). The U.K.-based company’s augmented reality browser also has four paid advertisers on-board. Their most popular product is the subway finder.
Despite hype around the field, only one startup, Layar, has raised a venture-backed round in the last quarter.
“The whole augmented reality industry has just hit VCs in the face pretty quickly. They haven’t had time to digest it and see the impact. Secondly, no one really knows which particular platform is going to take off,” said Chetan Damani, AcrossAir’s CEO. “Then there are still concerns about technical limitations and GPS accuracy.”
Plus, augmented reality is pretty divisive in general, he said. “We rarely get the people down the middle — they either love it or they just don’t see the point.”
AcrossAir has eight employees and Damani self-funded the company. He and his business partner also run a digital marketing ag

Tweetdeck, the most popular external client for Twitter, underwent a major overhaul today. It’s adding in LinkedIn updates, along with all of Twitter’s new features including geolocation, retweets and lists.
Like other clients, which help you read Twitter updates quickly, Tweetdeck is morphing into a social media dashboard by aggregating data from multiple social networks including Facebook, MySpace and now LinkedIn. This means you can read status updates from all four places in one space.
What’s interesting about the update is Tweetdeck’s unique integration of Twitter’s new retweet feature, which has divided the community. The old way of retweeting, or sharing a tweet from someone else, was done manually. You would type ‘RT’, the Twitter handle of the person, and then the retweet. And maybe you’d add in a comment or thought about what the other person said.
But when Twitter decided to add formal support for the feature, their version wouldn’t let users comment on retweets. It would automatically just copy what the other person said. Tweetdeck lets you go both ways. You can click one button to do it Twitter’s way, or another to add a comment or edit the tweet.
Tweetdeck’s lists and geolocation integration are pretty standard compared to what other clients have done. You can convert groups of Twitter accounts you follow into lists, import the lists you’ve built on Twitter.com as extra columns, or build your own inside Tweetdeck.
You can access Twitter’s geolocation feature by clicking a red dot under tweets. It will drop down to show you a map of where the tweet came from.
Tweetdeck has raised more than $2 million in two rounds of funding.

Chrome OS is Google’s latest entry into the consumer space. It is designed to be an operating system that runs on customized hardware and provides the user with only a state-of-the art browser running HTML-5 and some plugins. The tech (and mainstream) media has seen no shortage of opinions about its meaning and future impact on the industry. Unfortunately, I think most people have missed some of the key implications of Chrome OS.
[As a disclosure, I am a former Google employee, having worked there from 2002 to 2008, but I don't have any inside information on this project. In fact I didn't even know of its existence before I left.]
Google has two main aims with this project:

To use the Google brand and buzz about its “game-changing OS” to push for new and better web apps using nascent technology. This lets Google reduce its customers’ dependence on local apps it does not control.
Once a lot of these apps are deployed and become heavily used, the mass market will force owners of closed systems like the iPhone to implement support for HTML-5, the latest version of HTML, and rich web interfaces. Coupled with net neutrality (which Google currently strongly supporting) this will allow Google to circumvent uncooperative devices and network providers, and access consumers currently hidden behind locked system.

Here is a more detailed analysis:
People are switching to netbooks in droves. Ever since the advent of AJAX and Web 2.0, a great number of things that people used to do using local apps are being done by web-based applications. This transformation is by no means complete; it is clear that many interfaces are not refined and much critical functionality is absent, but the trend is undeniable.
Modern operating systems have very rich interfaces that give application developers and users a great deal of power. This is great in some ways — it lets you write awesome local applications, and offers great performance. However, as Spiderman’s Uncle Ben said,

Mobile driving application waze is adding a little extra inventive for users to help build out its crowdsourced maps. It already offers users points for “munching” up the road — i.e., driving around with waze and validating the app’s directions. The latest version adds “road goodies,” special spots on the map that you get extra points for driving over.
Those goodies (hammers, cherries, and presents) are placed on waze maps wherever the company has identified problems. When you drive over those spots with waze activated, it uses GPS data from your phone to correct the map. As a bonus, waze’s maps start looking more and more like the Pac-Man video game.
The company, based in Israel and Palo Alto, Calif., is kicking off the new game with a contest that will last until Nov. 30. At the end of that time, the users with the three highest scores will win Amazon gift cards worth up to $500.
Waze launched in the United States in May, and added turn-by-turn directions at the DEMOfall conference. It’s now available on the Android and iPhone as a downloadable application, as well as on Windows Mobile and Symbian phones through its mobile websites. The company declined to share its user numbers.

Mobile music app maker Amidio launched its Touch DJ application for the iPhone today, allowing users to spin and mix music right on their handsets. Since a demo of the app appeared on YouTube on Nov. 17, it has received 35,000 hits. People are excited worldwide.
One of the major hurdles standing in the way of a mobile DJ in the past was that the iPhone and iPod Touch only have one stereo output — so you couldn’t listen to multiple songs or beats at the same time. Amidio says it has solved this problem with a new technology called “visual mixing” — something unique to the Touch DJ app.
As the name implies, “visual mixing” takes each track, breaks it into parts, and assigns each part its own visual signature. Each of these elements can then be played with separately to match the visual signature of another piece or track. When the ‘kick’ or base portions are visually matched (by changing the track’s position or pitch), the audio seems to flow. This process, called beatmatching, is what makes club music danceable.
With Touch DJ, you can now, at least theoretically, show up at a party, plug your phone into the stereo, and mix some fresh beats, just like Danger Mouse. The application lets you set loop-back points so that you can go from digital verse written on the fly back to a safe chorus while you work on your next mind-blowing groove.
Old-school scratching can be simulated by flicking your finger across the screen of your phone. Want to slow it all down? Push a button on DJ’s virtual display. Speed it back up?  Take your finger off. If you want to pre-listen to your mixes before they hit the speakers, you can get a stereo splitter and a pair of headphones — it looks pretty simple all around.
The one snag is that you can’t take music from your iTunes library and use it in Touch DJ — it requires its own mp3 library. This may prove to be sticking point for the average Joe, not as much for Joe Cool DJ.
For aspiring music producers, hobbyists

There are tons of karaoke applications for the iPhone, but a startup called Khu.sh is introducing a twist on the concept, “reverse karaoke,” to the App Store.
There have been other reverse karaoke products, most notably Microsoft Songsmith, a Windows application that lets you record your singing, then automatically generates musical accompaniment. Songsmith even prompted a series of YouTube videos highlighting the hilarious badness of many of the resulting songs.
Khu.sh’s iPhone app, LaDiDa, lets you do something similar on your iPhone. You choose a style (such as E Piano Pop or Dub Tone) and tempo, sing into the iPhone, and LaDiDa adds the music. You can also share the recordings on Facebook or Twitter. A $0.99-version of LaDiDa was first released last month, and Khu.sh added a free version (with fewer musical styles) called LaDiDa Lite (iTunes link) this week. You can check out the results in the video below.
This may seem like little more than a novelty, but if musical iPhone app developer Smule can have a hit with something like I am T-Pain (which overlays your singing with Auto Tune technology), I could see plenty of iPhone owners embracing this, too — though it’s a little more challenging without the help of a hip hop star like T-Pain.
Khu.sh is based in Atlanta and has raised $120,000 in seed funding, including $20,000 from incubator Shotput Ventures.

Google hasn’t traditionally engaged in large-scale advertising campaigns. Instead, it has relied mainly on word of mouth to become the $180 billion company it is today. However in the last year, the company has rolled out bigger and bigger paid advertising efforts (as many mature brands start to do). That includes the Go Google campaign back in August, promoting Google apps as a reliable alternative to Microsoft Office for businesses.
Yesterday, Google rolled out a series of videos with the slogan “Search On” promoting Googling! They include an adorable one about falling in love in Paris, another video on how to use Google to become Batman, and one retracing Jack Kerouac’s route in “On the Road.”
Parisian Love:

Batman:

Kerouac: