Smartphones carry advanced cameras with new technologies while laptops and other devices struggling and lagging behind. Now the void is fulfilled with Intel’s RealSense 3D camera installed on laptops and others. It uses two depth sensors in addition to a standard lens. This creates a 3D effect and the technology allows removal of the background without a green screen. Picture and gestures are more accurate and allow of 3D scan of real objects. Intel’s standalone RealSense 3D F200 can be connected to a PC using USB3 port. There are other technical requirements for connecting the camera to a PC too.

The gesture-based technology consists of series of consumer 3D cameras. It consists of several components including a color camera, depth camera with IR light source and microphone array. The technology allows face recognition and tracking, hand and other object tracking, and voice recognition.

Recent laptops and tablets from several manufacturers including Dell, Acer, HP, Asus and Lenovo are already using the technology and many more will follow soon. Natural user interface technology is used in Kinect, Leap, HoloLenses and many other products. Many expect the technology to migrate into all-in-one devices within the year.

Do not rely on a single source of traffic, because that will only grow your campaign so far. You will find your creative will wear out its welcome, your brand will saturate the marketplace and dilute itself, and the strength of your campaigns will decrease.

Instead, utilize a buy-side platform to deliver highly targeted traffic from a wider range of sites. This expanded inventory typically offers lower bids, targeted traffic and the chance to increase conversion rates.

Targeting Basics

If you’re looking to target by more than just interest, a buy-side platform can offer you the ability to micro-target base on almost any characteristic of your audience. If you want to bid on mobile traffic, you bid on service provider or device. Desktop ads can be shown to people using a specific browser. You can even target by location, sometimes getting hyper-local by city or town.

If you manage your campaigns and take advantage of this precision targeting, you will see greater profit margins and higher volumes of traffic.

Why Real-Time Matters

When you bid on a buy-side platform, you’re bidding on real-time traffic. This means that your campaign goes live and begins collecting data the moment everything is finalized. Check your analytics to be sure the campaign is receiving traffic, and then monitor bids to be sure you’re not getting outbid and losing traffic. You can also begin to make some guesses at what people might be doing upon viewing your landing page by looking at bounce rate and the time spent on a particular page.

This is also excellent for experimentation because you can see if your changes are improving performance within a few hours instead of a few days.

Conclusions and Takeaways

When you have control over your campaigns, you’re able to run tests and scale campaigns according to your own strategy. Market research will teach you which bids are most important, and you’ll learn more about targeting as you begin to collect data about your market, but you can deploy changes and see results quickly.

If you are in a market susceptible to changing trends, working in real-time is essential. If there is a delay in reporting, you may think you’re bidding on great placements only to discover the fad has passed. Buy-side platforms offer greater control over your campaigns and immediate data.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is a digital marketing expert with roots in the industry that trace back to the early 2000s. Ted Dhanik is the co-founder and CEO of engage:BDR. Learn more about Ted Dhanik when you visit engage:BDR.

Mobile advertising is a game of immediacy, but you can micro-target for extremely specific use cases. Data is the king of mobile. When you purchase mobile traffic from an ad exchange, you are buying from a wide array of traffic sources and networks. The data you have about your target market should inform every decision you make. You can quickly find yourself over spending to accumulate data you can’t use. Use these simple tips to give your campaigns a boost without over spending.

Pay Attention to Details

You should know what time of day you tend to get the most conversions, and note days of the week too. Pay attention to the frequency that your ads are shown to users, and be sure that you’re not diluting your brand in pursuit of a conversion. Train yourself to notice bounce rates and to notice when your traffic or conversions start dropping off. This could be a sign that your ads need to be rotated, or your creative is getting stale.

Theorize and Test

Don’t make a change without having an end game. In the beginning, your goal is to figure out what works about your ad and how you can optimize your traffic to achieve maximum conversions. Once you understand what your audience wants to see, try something new in a different ad group. The most common place to start is with the headline, which is typically packed with benefits and keywords. An easy test to run is to add your keyword into the headline and see how it performs. The assumption is that users looking for that keyword will respond to your ad because it contains the keyword. Once you have found that users do or do not respond to keywords, you can test this theory with other keywords or move on to other campaigns.

Location Targeting

Mobile campaigns tend to be highly specific to a certain location. Sometimes, the offer is only valid at that location but more often than not it’s a question of where your target audience lives. Mobile tends to work best when it can service the user before a brick and mortar store, or when it offers a lower price than a brick and mortar store.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is the co-founder and CEO of engage:BDR, and is active in the Los Angeles startup incubator Start Engine. Ted Dhanik has used display advertising to launch brands, build leads and increase sales. Contact Ted Dhanik online when you visit engage:BDR.

Text ads are everywhere. We see them all over search, and all over sites within content. It might seem like text is everything, but images can add a lot of context that text cannot. Research shows that our brains process images differently than text, which is why so many brands incorporate image and text. Nike, Apple and even Chase Bank all incorporate some image with their text.

You should aim for the same effect in your own messaging, and it’s easy to achieve if you have a good eye for what pairs well. Here are some tips to help you utilize images in your mobile and banner advertising.

Tell the Customer What to Do

Be bold and tell your customer exactly what you want them to do. Do it in a button, where they can clearly see what they are supposed to click. Strong colors like green or blue are good, but red is not. After all, you don’t want the customer to stop do you?

Also, tell customers what to expect in your call to action. Are customers downloading a report? Use “Download Now” as your call. Same with “Learn More,” “Apply now” and “Find Savings.” These calls are far more effective than “Click Here.”

Try New Things

Start with an ad that is fairly close to something your competitors run, then work on adding your own spin. This is all part of competitive research and you will find that what works for your competition will not work for you. Human pictures can help make your products more relatable, while the product itself can be a valuable sales pitch. Apple, for instance, rarely shows real humans wearing their products. The emphasis is on that iconic white. Test these new ideas in separate ad groups and track their results to compare with your top performers.

Include Data on Pricing

It’s a misconception that customers don’t want to see the sales price. You can use a colored burst to highlight the cost, or you can look for other methods to lower the price without changing what the consumer pays. Try subsidizing shipping costs to your local area or offering a coupon code to people who click your ad. Testing will be crucial here, so that you can maximize your returns.

Keep it Relevant

Relevancy to the consumer is still your number one goal. Every element of your ad should be designed to get the customer clicking on something that will bring them closer to a point of action.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is the CEO and co-founder of the Los Angeles based advertising company, engage:BDR. Ted Dhanik helps business owners run engaging ads on the Web. Find out how to use display advertising to generate business leads with tips from Ted Dhanik.

Written by: Denton Vacuum, LLC

Summary: Metallic finishes are applied using advanced manufacturing techniques.

Ever wonder how motorcycles, bicycles and cars all get that anodized finish to the metallic parts they use? Some of that work is old-fashioned elbow grease, but advanced manufacturing techniques like sputter deposition can help give metals the brushed finish hobbyists and collectors expect in high quality products.

Basic Technique

The piece to be finished is placed inside of a vacuum sealed chamber, where the process of plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition begins. The metallic coating of the substance is broken down into a gaseous form, using extremely intense heat. The molecules are then fed into a vacuum sealed chamber, which is cooled at precise intervals. As the chamber cools, the molecules come to settle upon the substrate. In order to form a smoother finish, the substrate may be rotated so the molecules can coat its surface evenly.

Using Magnets

Another method utilizes magnetron sputtering, which pulls and reflects particles based on their ionic charges. This technique is often used when an even coating is desired, because of how the molecules move within the chamber. Typically, magnetron sputtering systems leave no visible defects and the layers are microns in thickness.

Final Thoughts

There are a ton of uses for this technology that extend beyond the finish of hobby products. Plastics, for instance, can receive a metallic coating to reinforce their strength. That greatly reduces the costs of producing screws and other small objects needed in the construction of jet or car engines.

When you want to market a product or service, the fastest way to get started is through display advertising. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed if you try to run too many campaigns. It’s best to find a product that has a good conversion rate and try to run a campaign with it. From beginning to end, here are some tips designed to help you run your first ad campaign.

Talk with an Affiliate

Before you sell your own product, try to sell someone another prooduct that is more established. Selling an affiliate product through ad exchanges will teach you the fundamentals you need to get a campaign running, and to make some money with it. Speak with an affiliate representative and ask them about campaigns that have a strong conversion. Get a feel for the kind of audience you should target, but be prepared to do your own research on the topic.

Competitive Research

You want to start your basic research with some searches about your product, and the ideas related to it. Let’s say your product is a job website. You’ll want to learn what kinds of websites the unemployed are looking at, what they are reading, and anything you can about their aspirations. Knowing, for example, which job market is hottest at any given moment would help you hyper target your searches and learn even more about your market. Once you’ve gathered some data, set up a campaign with an ad exchange.

Your First Banner Advertising Campaign

Ad exchanges sell traffic directly to you, and they let you segment that traffic based on the observations you made during the research phase. You should have some ideas on keywords you want to pursue, demographics you want to target and which campaigns you want to run. Try to limit your campaigns so you can manage the results.

Record everything you can about the campaign, including how many visits your landing page receives and how many conversions you acquire. Also note the time of day that your site experiences the most traffic, and anything else you think may be relevant. Data acquisition is an art, and it’s not always clear which points will be most valuable when you begin a campaign.

Analyzing and Scaling

Getting your campaign working, and producing good conversion rates at a reasonable cost, is a matter of fine tuning the traffic settings and advertising models you have. Try varying your keywords, adjusting for location and other variables that might help eliminate traffic from viewers who don’t want to see your ads.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is the co-founder of engage:BDR, where he oversees strategic marketing and sales for the company. Ted Dhanik began his career with MySpace.com and LowerMyBills.com, where he sold engaging ads. Ted Dhanik has a degree in business administration from California State University Hayward.

Written by: Denton Vacuum, LLC

Summary: Thin film applies a smooth coating to a substrate, often changing its properties entirely.

Thin film evaporation allows manufacturers to coat devices with substances that can alter their properties entirely. This process is used in metallization of screws, where plastic pieces are turned into durable objects used in high-performance settings.

This manufacturing technique is used by many industries that produce products that live in your home.

Techniques

Thin Film is only one technique used to apply coatings to a substrate. In ion beam assisted coatings, a laser is used to guide the application of materials onto the substrate. Plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition superheats chemicals to a gas state, and is used in manufacturing solid objects like eye glasses.

Uses

To extend the eyeglass example, PECVD allows a manufacturer to break down a chemical into gaseous form. The molecules are applied to the lens as they cool, coming to settle on the surface of the lens as it is carefully rotated for an even coating. You may see this process at work in medical devices as well, especially in those that use hydrophilic coatings for better interaction with organic material.

Advantages to Thin Film

This technique is preferable to sputter deposition, because the finish created is smoother. It’s free from defects, or small inconsistencies that would normally coat an object that has undergone sputter deposition. It also makes it easier for manufacturers to bind certain chemicals and create entirely new substances. Plasma-enhanced silicon nitride, for example, is a thin film used in the formation of high performance automobile parts.

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You never want to start copywriting on a blank slate, which is the fastest way to fail. Your ideas are great, but they lack the universal appeal you need to really break into display advertising effectively. Marketing copy is all about capitalizing on trends and keywords related to your industry. Searching for what’s already out there helps you identify what problems your audience faces, which helps inform your banner advertising. With these tips, you’ll never find yourself at a shortage of material for copywriting.

Surf Social Media

Begin with a few glances at some related pages on social media. Look for what customers are talking about on these business pages, and the kind of content being posted in the first place. Social media pages are public, so you can learn a lot about how customers interact with brands in your industry. You can also mine social media to figure out what people care about. Pins from Pinterest, Likes from Facebook, and Retweets from Twitter all send signals that your audience is interested by something. Don’t ignore those signs.

Combine Data You Already Have

All of that voting and pinning and liking is happening at a grand scale every day, and you’re sure to find some correlations within your own data sets. Through Analytics, you have a deeper understanding of what customers do on your pages. Look for keywords from social media, and then compare what people are discussing to the most popular pages on your site. You will find ways to inject some of that discussion into your own display advertising, and redirect customers to the proper parts of your site.

Marrying Data and Creative

What you learn about your customers and their challenges should help to inform your banner advertising. You should be highlighting key benefits that solve their problems, and you should be using colors and images they are familiar with. You may also learn more about them as a demographic, enabling you to target with more precision. Try to restructure your planning such that you incorporate the research process into choosing creative and buying traffic.

Conclusions

There is no point in trying to force messaging on your customers. They aren’t likely to respond, and retargeting will just bother them. Instead, try to let your market research inform the copywriting that you do, and focus on addressing user concerns in more direct language. You will find that your money will be better spent focusing on what your audience wants, instead of playing a numbers game.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is the CEO of Los Angeles based direct marketing company engage:BDR. Ted Dhanik is focused on creating amazing ad campaigns for mobile and desktop, with an emphasis on lead generation. To reach Ted Dhanik, follow his blog or contact engage:BDR.

Eye glasses are made with very specific requirements in mind. The design and shape of the lens, as well as UHV sputter deposition coatings it may receive, contribute to the user’s overall visual quality. A lens that is shaped incorrectly, or one that is easily scratched, can quickly degrade a user’s vision and sometimes cause headaches and other side effects.

Cutting

First, the lens must be cut from a resin block called a lens blank. The size and shape is not unlike a hockey puck. The doctor dictates the cut of the lens, and gives a prescription that technicians translate into instructions for a computer. The lens is shaped according to those precise instructions, curving the front and back of the lens to bend light accordingly.

Fine Shaving

The lens is rough after this process, so the lens must be thoroughly polished. The lens is placed on a polishing block, where the convex end is rubbed with a fine grit to make it transparent. Of course, this is just the shaping and polishing of the lens. It must still be cut to size. A lens edger utilizes a diamond cutting wheel to trim the lens to the desired size.

Coating

Optical coating systems are used to add an anti-reflective coating to the lenses. The lenses are placed in a dust-free chamber, where they may receive up to sixteen separate layers of coatings designed to reduce scratches and glare. Some of these coatings even repel oil and water. Once the lens iscoated, it is fit to the glasses the customer ordered.

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Bio: Denton Vacuum, LLC makes a thermal evaporation system for use in coating medical apparatuses. For medical manufacturing machinery, visit Denton Vacuum, LLC.

MEMS are built using materials that are not unlike those of a semiconductor. The microscopic machines require layers of materials that are built up, in precise patterns, to relay information or power from source to another. Using manufacturing techniques like plasma-enhanced chemical vapor distribution, materials can be arranged in precise patterns for carrying out complex operations.

Deposition

PECVD is part of the process that allows manufacturers to design objects within 100 micrometers. Gases are released onto a substrate, where they “grow” by layers as the gasses cool and adhere to one another. Essentially, materials are broken down and built up by layer. One of the methods used is sputtering, which uses a spray pattern not unlike a can of spray paint.

Lithography

The precise patterns used to create MEMS are only possible thanks to a process using thin film deposition. First, the object is coated in a lightly radioactive substance. This could be a beam of light, for instance. The exposed parts would differ from those that were not exposed, and then a machine deposits thin layers of materials onto the parts that light as touched.

Conclusions

Extreme precision makes it possible to create smaller mechanisms to handle a variety of everyday tasks in the house. MEMS help to gauge the stability of something, like a level, so you’ll often find them in video game and cell phone applications that display according to the orientation of the device.

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