"Powered by the air that you breathe. Activated by the water that you and I drink!" With those words promoting the massive hit product OxiClean nearly a decade ago, Billy Mays moved from successful pitchman into the ranks of direct response television's legends. Throughout the next decade, and dozens of hit TV products that grossed more than $1 billion in sales, Mays career skyrocketed, cementing his place not only in DRTV but also in pop culture. Sunday's announcement that Mays, 50, had died at his Tampa home left not only DR industry insiders stunned, but also a nation of fans and customers in mourning.

Los Angeles-based interactive marketing agency, Zugara, unveiled an interactive video/augmented reality application, Tuesday, called the Webcam Social Shopper. According to the company, the app allows Webcam-equipped users to virtually hold up articles of clothing in front of themselves in order to see how they look on them--while integrated motion capture technology allows the app to track their movements, and thereby also enables them to control the app by moving their hands in space.

Warner Bros. is holding an interactive video contest to promote the July 15th opening of the latest movie in the "Harry Potter" franchise, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Dubbed "The Advanced Potion-Making Experience" and featured on YouTube, the contest invites visitors to create their own potion-making videos and share them with their friends.

Digitalsmiths, a leading video platform company, is launching VideoSense 2.0, a suite of content management, publishing, presentation and search products. In particular, the new release includes an innovative "free form" video search box that leverages Digitalsmiths' metadata creation capability.

For years, the promise of online video advertising has been just that -- a promise. The reality has been a big disappointment: ads that look and feel like TV, and are repurposed from TV creative, only much more annoying. The reason for this is twofold: advertisers and agencies were reticent to spend money on new creative for online video, and the video market itself was splintered, and lacked the kind of content advertisers were comfortable with. But with the TV-upfront market frozen and advertisers looking for lower-cost means to reach consumers, a push is on to try formats that could finally realize some of the potential of online video with targeted ads that engage with real interactivity.

For online video to move from its current, largely experimental phase to a commercially meaningful business, several critical things need to happen, panelists at the Digital Media Conference agreed here Thursday."We need standardization around three things," Blip.tv co-founder Dina Kaplan said. "First, we need to agree on what is [an ad] ‘view.' We've all gone to Web sites where some ad starts playing automatically until you can figure out how to mute the sound. There are companies that pump out 40 million impressions that way, but is that a view the same way click-to-play is a view?"Second," she added, "we need appropriate ad-format standards [for video]. Is 30 seconds, or even 15 seconds really the best format for pre-rolls? Why not seven seconds, or 10?""Third," Kaplan continued, "we need a Nielsen for the Web, some third party advertisers could trust to provide real data."

When it comes to rich media, video could be the best bet for purchasing conversions. According to a DoubleClick benchmark study, video within rich media ad units are pushing more purchase conversions than non-video ads.

Facebook overtook search engine Google for mobile internet traffic in May, according to the latest State of the Mobile Web report by Opera. Since last year mobile internet page-view growth is up 124.3 percent. Unique-user growth since May 2008 is 49.1 percent. Page views per user averaged 222 in May 2009.