With a population approaching half of a billion users, if Facebook was its own nation it would be the third largest in the world behind China and India. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that secondary activities on Facebook – like viewing videos – can still produce high rankings for the site that compete with the likes of Hulu and YouTube . One of the ways users on Facebook view video is through advertisements, and a recent study by TubeMogul revealed some interesting stats on which ones worked, and why. Sponsor TubeMogul studied the various forms of video advertising displayed throughout Facebook, including in-banner video, interstitial and virtual currency ads. Virtual currency ads are served to gamers who receive points or virtual money within a game in return for completing them, and they turned out to be one of the best methods of attracting traffic. You Scratch My Back, I’ll Scratch Yours According to the study, around 43% of virtual currency ad viewers completed the entire ad, and roughly 52% watched at least three quarters of the ad. These numbers just barely inch out those of in-banner and interstitial ads, but where the virtual currency ads excel is in click-through and share rate. By rewarding viewers for completing ads, advertisers see a click-through rate double that of in-banner ads and over 5 times that of interstitial ads. Users share these ads on Facebook and Twitter roughly 50% more than in-banner ads and around 6 times more than interstitial ads. Additionally, virtual currency ads are watched 6 seconds longer than in-banner ads on average, and nearly 5 times longer than interstitial ads. The most intriguing statistic from the study, especially for advertisers, is the price of these ads compared to how long they are watched. The study found that virtual currency ads average $0.22 per minute viewed, nearly identical to the $0.23 cost for interstitial ads. In-banner ads, on the other hand, averaged $6.27 per minute viewed. How Facebook Ads Stack Up Against Web Benchmarks But how do these Facebook ads compare to ads placed outside of the site. TubeMogul used an off site benchmark to gauge the advantage or disadvantage of using Facebook for video ads. The study found that Facebook users are nearly twice as likely to finish watching ads than they would outside of the site, but click-throughs for the benchmark ads were higher than in-banner and interstitial Facebook ads. Virtual currency and in-banner ads are watched between 9 and 15 seconds longer than offsite ads, but the offsite ads tend to be better value to advertisers than many Facebook-based ads. Targeting Ads at User Behaviors User behavior seems to play a large role in determining which Facebook video ads work the best. By rewarding game players with virtual currency, advertisers see higher click-throughs, longer watch times and higher value from their ads. Interstitial ads, which pop up as users navigate through games and apps, garner just a fraction of the view time and click-through rate despite being cheaper to implement. Interstitial ads seem obtrusive to users since they only appear at the exact moment a user has clicked to navigate from one screen to another, so it makes sense that users close them quickly in frustration. By offering Facebook users with rewards for watching videos at their own discretion, advertisers attain much higher view times and click-throughs. Discuss

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Memeo , the company behind a host of backup, sharing and synchronization tools and mobile applications, has just launched Memeo Connect 2.0 , an updated version of its earlier desktop-to-cloud synchronization service for Google Docs . Like its progenitor, Memeo Connect still offers drag-and-drop uploads, but in the latest release, the application’s operating system integration has been dramatically improved. Most notably, your Google Docs folder now appears as a virtual drive that Memeo labels “GDrive”, and, according to company representatives, the name is being used with Google’s blessing. Sponsor But Is it Really a “GDrive”? To Internet early adopters, the name ” GDrive ” rings more than a few bells. It’s referring to the long-rumored cloud storage service that Google has yet to launch. In its imagined state, Google’s GDrive would have been a lot like Microsoft’s SkyDrive : several gigabytes of free storage available on the Web for all your files. On the theoretical GDrive, however, files could be in any format, of any size and there would be easy ways to sync them or move them back and forth between your computer and the cloud. Office files would open with Google’s Docs service, an online counterpart to desktop programs like Microsoft Office, and some even imagined that GDrive would further integrate with other Google properties, like Picasa for photos or YouTube for videos. Google never fully realized everyone’s GDrive dreams, but its Google Docs service is functional enough for most. It allows for the upload of any file type while multiple third-party services offer decent options for keeping files in sync between your computers and cloud. These include Memeo competitors like Box.net, Dropbox, Syncplicity, SugarSync, OfficeSync, Gladinet and more. There are few programs that actually offer the full virtual drive functionality that Memeo now does, though. The company worked closely with Google to build this latest version of its Connect software and when Google engineers found out Memeo was calling the virtual folder it creates “GDrive,” they had a good laugh. Sorry, Internet, Google isn’t designing its own GDrive service anytime soon, but it’s well aware of the rumors. Google actually prefers that, when it comes to GDrive-type offerings, third parties do it for them. The closest thing we’ll see to a Google-branded tool of any sort is a desktop uploader application now being built, sources tell us. But it’s no GDrive, based on what we’ve heard. Version 2.0: More OS Integration Blurs Line Between Desktop and Cloud In Memeo’s case, version 2.0 of its software continues to offer drag-and-drop uploads (even folders!) and automatic synchronization. But it goes further with a combination of features that make using its so-called GDrive a more viable option. For example, you can save files from your desktop-based applications like Microsoft Office directly to Google Docs via GDrive, and you can open GDrive-hosted files with its associated native desktop program. In other words, it blurs the line between the cloud and the desktop, just as Google’s mythical GDrive would have supposedly done. And for that reason, we don’t at all begrudge Memeo the name “theft.” Memeo Connect ’s other new features include the ability to select multiple files at once for deletion (from the cloud), filter files by type or category, download all Google Docs with a click, view folders shared with you via Google Docs and more. And let’s not forget one of the most exciting new features: full text search for documents, another benefit of the in-depth collaboration between Memeo and Google when building this new version of Connect. To truly transition to cloud-hosted files, this feature is considered a must-have for many users. For Business Users Only? Memeo Connect is more business-focused than it is a consumer tool. It’s not available as a “freemium” offering, as some would expect. Surprisingly, that’s not Memeo’s decision, but rather Google’s. Google restricts its API usage for these types of synchronization services so that they only work with those who have business-level accounts. As far as pricing goes, for Google Premier users, it’s $9 a year per user and for non-Premier users, it’s $59 a year per user, which includes a new Google Apps Premier Account in addition to the sync service. Memeo Connect 2.0 is available for free evaluation from here . Both Mac and PC versions are available. Discuss

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A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about social travel site Stay.com ’s expansion. After months of retooling, the user-built travel guide site has relaunched and we have had a chance to play the virtual flâneur. Among other changes, Stay.com has struck deals with TripAdvisor , TopTable and OpenTable . They are planning on adding in more such information as they go forward. Sponsor Users of Stay.com pull elements such as hotels, restaurants, bars, shopping, museums and gardens together with a click, to create a guide crafted to their needs, tastes and destinations. It can be consulted on computer or smart phone, or printed out as a pocket-sized .pdf. Users can broadcast their itinerary or parts of it to friends via Facebook and Twitter. Each guide that gets created adds to the library of itineraries available to users. Stay.com’s goal, according to its publicist and materials, was to make a very intuitive interface for travelers and they seem to have done that. The cities, lodging, bars and so on, are arranged hierarchically from most likely to be needed to possibly useful. The ability to both read it online and to print it out serves those who either wish to untether or who find electronics less useful on their trick (not enough power or too many pickpockets, for instance). For some types of sites, the more dazzling they are, the more enjoyable. This is not necessarily the case with travel. You’re already traveling, after all. Oh, the sights you’ll see – they’re more important than the sites. In that respect, the pleasant but clean design, in service of the travel, is appealing. Additional features Stay.com plans to roll out include user-added venues and places, third-party sharing widgets, full mobile integration and geolocation and video guides. Discuss

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The open source project TurnKey Linux has launched a private beta of the TurnKey Hub , a service that makes it easy to launch and manage the project’s Ubuntu-based virtual appliances in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Sponsor There are currently about 40 software bundles in Turkey Linux’s virtual library, including Joomla , Wordpress , and Moodle . According to TurnKey Linux, these virtual appliances are optimized for easy deployment and maintenance. And as the name implies, launching an instance with one of the virtual appliances is very simple. Custom passwords and authentication, as well as automatic setup for EBS devices and Elastic IPs, are part of the setup process. According to their website, “Packaging a solution as a virtual appliance can be incredibly useful because it allows you to leverage guru integration skills to build ready to use systems (i.e., turn key solutions) that just work out of the box with little to no setup. Unlike with traditional software, you don’t have to worry about complex OS compatibility issues, library dependencies or undesirable interactions with other applications because a virtual appliance is a self contained unit that runs directly on top of hardware or inside a virtual machine.” Currently, the TurnKey Hub launches on an instance volume in the EC2 Cloud. But according to the developers, support for additional cloud platforms, as well as automatic backup and migration functionality, is in the works. TurnKey Linux is a project started by Alon Swartz and Lirax Siri. While there are other turnkey cloud offerings, including Dell’s , but TurnKey Linux is firmly grounded in the open source community and not only strives to make the move to the cloud easier, but contends that a well-integrated and thoroughly tested virtual appliance can help facilitate open source adoption. Discuss

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Finland is quite a paradox. One would not think that a country with only 5 million people, plunged into darkness for a greater part of the year, would be the inventor of Linux, SSH, IRC, Nokia, F-Secure and MySQL. While the country is known for its technical feats, heavy metal bands, saunas, and educational system, it’s less known for its startups. Success stories include Sulake , owner of Habbo Hotel (one of the largest virtual worlds, with tens of millions of users, and pioneers of micro-transactions several years before Farmville) and Irc-Galleria , which is the largest social network for Finns. Sponsor Guest author Ramine Darabiha is an entrepreneur and occasional blogger at Nerdstalker and his own blog . Disclaimer: He is the CEO of MySites , which also partners with Xihalife, Dazzboard, Wreckamovie and Breezetags. He will also be a mentor at Summer of Startups. There was the $1 billion exit of MySQL to Sun, as well as Dopplr and Jaiku (the Finnish Twitter that was bought by Google and used as a basis for Google Buzz). Star Wreck was started by a group of friends from Tampere, and ended up having thousands of contributors and 8 million viewers, making it the most successful Finnish movie ever and the first major crowdsourced movie production. The Finnish ecosystem is facing many of the same challenges as other small European countries (I’ve made a list of the 10 major ones here ). There is a lack of entrepreneurs. Only 3% of the population wants to become entrepreneurs, and only a fraction of them want to create startups. Joining or starting a new venture is seen as a very risky thing, and there is still a strong stigma that people who are self-employed probably couldn’t find a “real” job in the first place. RWW’s Never Mind the Valley series: As is often the case in Europe, failure is perceived as extremely negative, rather than a learning opportunity. There is also a lack of visibility for Finnish startups. The local press and TV mostly ignore them, and blog coverage mainly comes from

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