The most credit can be given to the Financial services industry, which spent close to $300 million on AdWords. That’s about $100 million more than the next vertical, computers and Internet.

However, the top-spending AdWords advertiser was not a financial services company, but lovable old Amazon with $17.9 million. Capital One was the second biggest spender with $15.7 million doled out.

Check out this breakdown of AdWords spending by vertical, courtesy of AdGooroo:

Give a lot of credit to the Kinect gaming console, which sold 8 million times in 60 days. Oh, it turns out Windows 7 has sold over 300 million copies, earning the title of fastest-selling PC operating system ever. Twenty percent of PCs connected to the Internet are using the OS.

While there was no activation information or sales figures in regards to Windows Phone 7 handsets, the most stunning figure was a $563 million loss in online operating income during the quarter. Or perhaps it wasn’t stunning because such quarterly losses in online operating income have become par for the course.

Begging the question “Has any company lost as much money online as Microsoft?”, Silicon Alley Insider offers a damning chart exhibiting that Microsoft’s online operating income has been in the red for the last five years. The last four quarters show $2.5 billion in losses alone.

But wait, you say, Bing is making serious inroads in the search game, especially with the Yahoo integration! Well, Frank Reed at Marketing Pilgrim replies, ”Let’s face it, the only reason Google has any competition at all in search is because Microsoft is willing to lose a lot of money to say they are in the game.” Ouch.

It makes you wonder long Microsoft will keep up the losses, especially as a 30% drop year over year in Windows and Windows Live revenue may spell future trouble with a reliable cash stream. But there are bright spots — first, the losses are declining, and second, Microsoft’s deal with Facebook could seriously turn things around, especially as public annoyance with Google in the search space grows.

As I’ve suggested before, Bing could get lucky and be that social search engine we’ve been waiting for… Or if Bing powers Facebook search, perhaps we’ll just use the social network for search fulfillment.

A day after the social network for professionals took its targeted text ads out of beta, LinkedIn has filed for an IPO to raise $175 million. The pricing terms and timing of the offering have not been determined, but the lead underwriters for the IPO are Morgan Stanley, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan.

Founded in 2003, the network boasts more than 90 million members in 200 countries. Last year was the company’s first profitable year with net income for the first nine months of 2010 coming in at $10 million, compared to a loss of $3.9 million in 2009.

LinkedIn reported $201 million in revenue for the 12 months up to Sept. 30, 2010. The majority of the network’s revenue comes from “hiring solutions” (41%), with 32% from marketing and 27% from premium subscriptions.

Financial Services

One trend that has become increasingly prominent in the financial services market is sentiment-based equity trading. Companies and small hedge funds are now starting to trade stocks based on sentiment scores. These scores originate from news streams that are being scored by a sentiment engine. What’s really interesting is that these companies are actually seeing a significant return on these sentiments in their trades – around a 0.5% to 0.6% increase.

Legal/eDiscovery

For law firms drowning in endless textual documents, it can be difficult to ascertain major themes – especially when you’re not sure what topics to be searching for. Text analytics examines the words, phrases and hot topics that repeatedly appear and analyzes them. Naturally this is a great tool for firms or corporations focused on legal/eDiscovery with large amounts of content that needs to be analyzed.

Pharmaceuticals

From drug discovery to competitive analysis, from adverse event reporting to doctor feedback, every pharmaceutical company has a ton of text. 2011 will see the automation of many currently manual operations and the convergence of systems that are currently separate. In particular, we’ll see better research-oriented systems to help with rapidly picking out the important trends and tidbits from the firehose of published peer-reviewed research.

Social Media Monitoring

Many companies have already started to adopt social analytics. It is an important trend to address because it will be a crucial and mandatory element in 2011. Well over half the content available in an organization is textual.

If companies don’t start watching and listening to what’s happening, they will be in for a big surprise. Text analytics and sentiment analysis are essential tools for companies to understand what is being written on social networks, the blogosphere or any of the social media platforms.

As companies try to keep their finger on the pulse of what’s being said about their company and brand, a majority have turned to social media monitoring and “voice of the customer” monitoring. Previously social media monitoring was a smaller, niche industry with just a handful of vendors present. We’re beginning to see the two terms blend together.

In my opinion, the vendors that have been in the VOC monitoring space will most likely have an advantage over the social media monitoring vendors; the VOC vendors have been around longer and have better capabilities for dealing with this particular content. The VOC vendors are adopting these technologies at a fast rate to keep on top of both the social content and historical content (call logs, etc.).

Overall 2011 Market Trends

For the most part, 2010 was the year where sentiment analysis gained credibility. For 2011, expect to see the combination of tone and message, where it’s not just, “is this good or bad?” but in fact, “what is it that people are talking about?” It’s about combining the tone of what’s happening with what is actually happening. By pulling them together into an aggregated view, it will bring a lot more understanding than a simple sentiment measure across topics companies might be looking for.

In 2011, major text analytics vendors will continue to separate and dominate the newer players. Smaller players are vanishing and only open source is gaining traction. For those vendors, the complexity and breadth of their features are important, as the new markets will demand significant new features for these technologies.

One of the most important factors behind 2010’s success is social media’s worldwide adoption. It has been accepted by corporate America and companies all over the world as a channel they simply must monitor. If you want to know what’s happening to your company, brand or executives, the only way to do it is to use these types of technologies. This kind of adoption has pushed text analytics and other similar technologies such as this to the forefront. Without them, you don’t stand a chance.

Author: Jeff Catlin is the CEO of Lexalytics (www.lexalytics.com), a software and services company specializing in text and sentiment analysis.

Video ad tech firm Panache — which offers the Ad Flow solution that streamlines the video ad work flow process from ad sales to trafficking in order to dramatically reduce fulfillment costs — is introducing customizable “Lead Accelerator” ads that allow
financial companies to incorporate live data feeds to alert consumers to timely offer for products such as mortgages or personal loans.

The ad combines preroll, companion and overlay technology. In addition, the ad will direct data and qualified traffic to advertisers’ websites without requiring a secure rich-media takeover to generate leads.

“The finance industry has been reluctant to shift direct marketing dollars to digital video advertising due to a lack of insight into results and immediacy of impact,” said Panache CEO Steve Robinson. “The customizable ‘Lead Accelerator’ video ad is the first-of-its-kind for the financial industry. It not only builds brand awareness, but also drives real-time lead generation.”

This deal will make Hi-Media one of the biggest pure-play online companies in all of Europe as they are currently ranked the continent’s third interactive advertising agency and provide electronic micro-payment solutions in France.

Fotolog started in 2002 and is currently one of the Alexa 25 companies according to GigaOM.com, who broke the story yesterday morning.

The idea to lift this ban has finally come to fruition with talks of allowing bands and other member to sell merchandise on their MySpace pages. That is as soon as the company figures out how to monetize on these future transactions. Already News Corp. profits from a percentage of the sales of music on band sites, however Rupert Murdoch is looking to increase this profit and sees member-generated commerce as a solution.

Rules on commerce have been difficult to monitor with many pages advertising sites that will allow users to buy albums and various other paraphernalia. With the lift of a ban there also stands to be a great increase in profit with a projected $1 billion in sales, leveling out to $200 million in profit for the company should they devise a smart shared profit structure.

There have been discussions with Google about plans to create and monetize on the new concept, however nothing official has been put into motion.

One of the features of the contract is the birth of SounthParkStudios.com which will act like a development center for new show concepts and new character ideas.

The deal is worth a reported $75 million dollars over four years for Parker and Stone according to the New York Times. President of MTV Networks Entertainment, Doug Herzog stated to the Times about the unprecedented deal, “If this I seen as a bold stroke, all the better, because it’s going to take bold thinking to move ahead.”

Other executives justify the deal by the reputation of the brand and the success of the creators. “This is based upon a decade of proven success; it’s not a deal that made on the come, it’s not a deal made with an established creator who’s about to create something new. It’s 10 years in,” stated Warren Littlefield, a former president of NBC Entertainment.

The lawyer for the creative team pointed out that any revenue made from the brand other than the cable show itself was considered into the revenue that would be divided in half.

Stone made remarks about the luxury of receiving some ownership of the show back, “People always ask us, ‘You own it, right? No? Why’d you sign that deal?’ And I have to say, ‘Because I was sleeping on my friend’s couch.’ ”

“Studio 5M significantly enhances our ability to secure newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television networks and other advertising-supported media clients as they develop their online media assets,” said CEO Wing Yu in a statement. “By offering more compelling business content and rich media through our platform, we are now in an even better position to benefit directly from the rapid growth in online advertising.” FinancialContent’s service is used by more than 500 web sites around the world, including the Boston Globe, PR Newswire, and CBS News.

David J. Moore, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of 24/7 Real Media, said in a press statement, “The Company enjoyed an outstanding first quarter, substantially growing revenues and improving operating performance during what is traditionally a seasonally weak period. We continue to provide marketers with the ability to approach digital advertising as a precisely measurable science. Our recently announced release of Open AdStream(R) 6 exemplifies the innovation powering our leading solutions for publishers and advertisers. We will continue to leverage our expertise in technology and results-oriented services to drive significant growth in revenue and profitability through 2006 and beyond.”

24/7 Real Media’s growth reflects the overall rapid increase of revenue in the Media Solutions, Search Solutions, and Technology Solutions sectors during the first quarter of 2006.