When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued new rules last October that govern how bloggers in the U.S. can publish endorsements or reviews of products for which they’ve received compensation, a lot of controversy ensued. Mainly because bloggers saw this as a direct attack on their ability to report on products or consumer services. At the time, however, most Netizens seemed to at least agree that the rules appeared to be fair across the board.
Boy were we wrong.
Apparently, how a law is written and how it’s enforced …
Facebook is redesigning their home page, at long last. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, announced a teaser to the changes on the Facebook Blog last night in celebration of the social media site’s 6th anniversary and 400 millionth user. Later, on the same blog, Jing Chen introduced the new updates.
Some of the new improvements include putting more core features right on the front page in easily-accessible menu options. The features are rolling out slowly, with about 100 million users having it as of this writing and the other 300 million expected to have them before the weekend is through.
The biggest change are the new icons at the top of the user’s home page. These will include quick links to things most-often used by those logging in: requests, messages, and notifications. The icons turn red when something new is in the section they represent, giving a fast visual cue to the latest updates to your Facebook activity.
On the left is another newly enhanced menu, this one giving links directly to your feeds, messages, friends, photos, and so forth, as before. Now, however, when you click one of those links, such as your photos, the window that opens has links to your own photo albums as well as those of your friends, giving you the chance to browse easily and even see the latest updates to those photos immediately. Similar enhancements were made to friends lists and feeds.
Finally, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington this morning broke the news that Facebook is also working on a complete rewrite of their messaging system to build it into a full-featured webmail/email product. This is known as Project Titan and will likely be one of the biggest changes to the Facebook product in a long time.
The rumors with Titan are that it will be a full-featured webmail product much like Google’s Gmail, with POP/IMAP support, vanity URL emails, and more. Can’t wait.
So a lot of big stuff is happening at the Web’s largest social media giant.
When most people think of the National Football League’s Super Bowl, they think of two things: parties with friends watching the greatest football game of the year and the worlds most expensive commercials. Amazingly, this game that seems to be all about basic strategy and brute physical force is actually full of cutting-edge technology.
The 2007 Super Bowl in Miami was broadcast by CBS and involved hundreds of crew members manning Hi-Def cameras, long-reach microphones, expert computer technology to handle the play-by-play, hugely muscular data servers to provide up-to-the-second information and overlays, and more. All of that (and more) is converging in South Florida again and this time, Fox will be broadcasting the event and the tech will be even more dazzling.
The Super Bowl brings with it a lot of things: sex, excitement, and a general boost to local businesses. It also brings a lot of gadgetry. The little yellow line they overlay on the screen to determine whether it’s a first and ten or not? That requires a lot more computing muscle than most might think. The drawing of that one line requires computer models of the entire stadium, the field, computation of the angle of the camera and its orientation on the field itself, and a lot of number-crunching within a few milliseconds.
Lasers are used to map out the individual yard lines on the field before the game; cameras are positioned with perfect accuracy and range-finding equipment is used to calculate their zoom potential. All of that for one little yellow line on the screen. Now consider the huge databases of information that produce near-instant on-screen results for announcers or live broadcast feeds. Then there’s communication between Fox’s camera and production crews, the announcers, and more. That’s just the television side of things. The teams themselves have complex communications systems that go beyond the old “slap your wrist twice, tweak your nose, and nod your head three times” signals that used to be the game’s mainstay. In fact, even Madden’s old chalkboard X and O drawings are mostly gone too. Now, it’s scrambled and encrypted headset walkie-talkies, smart phones and PDAs on the field, and instant updates for fans on Twitter.
Not to mention the NFL’s official Super Bowl blog. Then there’s us fans. Local tech companies and freelancers, like Andre Rumyantsev, have been hired and are working feverishly to provide expanded content and technology solutions for the big game. “We are working to make sure the WiFi and cellular repeaters are in place and ready to go so that reporters, fans, and maybe even team members can access the Internet and do their thing real time,” he says. “It’s a real boost for us in some tough economic times, but Florida is all about IT and football!” Cell phone companies, including all the major players like Verizon and AT&T, are expecting activity in the Miami area to increase three or four times normal and have increased capacity with mobile towers and other technology to keep up.
Overall, the Super Bowl is about more than just a leather ball and big guys in uniforms. There is a lot of technology behind a game that appears, on its surface, to be such a simple match of brute force.
We must live in the 21st Century. Johnathan Schwartz, now the former CEO of Sun Microsystems, resigned from his post last night by tweeting a Haiku. His resignation is the final step in the total absorption of Sun into Oracle, which purchased Sun last week.
This is Schwartz’s tweet, the first-ever resignation by Twitter from a Fortune 200 company CEO:
An interesting way to resign, for sure, but some of Sun’s former employees and critics have rebuttals. Eric Savitz at Barrons found this one from a Yahoo! forum, which is quite funny:
Sorry, Jonathan / Don’t blame the economy / Blame poor leadership
The ponytailed CEO had an interesting career as the leader of Sun. He was kind of a love or hate figure, with people galvanized on both sides of the spectrum. Most believe that his initiative to move Sun from paid to open source software with revenues focused instead on the hardware around the software is what finally sunk the company into sell-off. The scheme, while innovative, appears to have not been well thought out or executed.
Schwartz was also very fond of social media, blogging regularly and tweeting often. In fact, originally his resignation was explained via his blog and the above tweet was sent as his last gesture as Sun’s CEO. When most chief executives are loathe to expose themselves to any kind of ridicule or possible lawsuits, this one took the opposite approach and welcomed an open style of management.
Whatever you think of his management and leadership style, one thing that Jonathan Schwartz has that has to be respected is his embracing of social media and outreach. He’s one of the few CEOs to have used it as a public relations tool without it coming off as a stiff-necked marketing stunt.
When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued new rules last October that govern how bloggers in the U.S. can publish endorsements or reviews of products for which they’ve received compensation, a lot of controversy ensued. Mainly because bloggers saw this as a direct attack on their ability to report on products or consumer services. At the time, however, most Netizens seemed to at least agree that the rules appeared to be fair across the board.
Boy were we wrong.
Apparently, how a law is written and how it’s enforced are two separate issues and this is a blatantly obvious illustration of how that works. The FTC’s website says this about celebrity endorsements:
“The revised Guides also make it clear that celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.”
That clearly says that celebrities, like the rest of us, are required to disclose any financial relationships they might have with products or services they are endorsing.
Well, to you and me it might clearly say that. To the FTC’s Rich Cleland, though, it doesn’t really say that. Instead, it has some caveats. At least, that’s what was reported by DailyFinance when Jeff Bercovici approached Cleland about an obvious (to him) violation of the new FTC rule by celebrity Gwenneth Paltrow.
According to the FTC’s advertising division associate director, there is a difference between Joe Blogger and celebrities: people commonly know that celebrities receive free stuff. We do? I was under the impression that celebs just get paid a boatload of money, not that they also got freebies.
Of course, if a celebrity like Paris Hilton were to blog about the greatness of the Hilton hotel chain, most of us would probably say “well, duhh.” If Brad Pitt were to appear in a commercial for Preparation H and be seen on Twitter saying that “Preparation H is awesome, I couldn’t sit down without it!” then we would probably put 2 and 2 together.
I can’t say that I can clearly draw a line when, however, Gwenneth Paltrow blogs about her awesome hotel experience without revealing any financial ties or compensation (freebies) she may have received in relation to that. She wasn’t in a commercial, ad spot, or otherwise clearly tied to the hotel in question, so it’s much shadier. Aren’t some bloggers considered celebrities in their arena? Who governs who a celebrity is? Maybe we should also have government agency to classify celebs vs. the rest of us.
To add to this, I heard a local radio show today where the host, Jeremy Loper on 103.1 repeatedly discussed the merits of a specific product, but never said anything about whether he is compensated for doing so. I would assume he is, since it was an apparent commercial slot, or why would he devote such time to it, but his clear avoidance of any actual disclosure seems to indicate that he’s in violation of the FTC’s rules. Other local radio show personalities down here Paul and Young Ron also talk about Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza, and never mention they get free pizza when they go. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, I am sure nobody gives much thought to it.
Oh, wait. Those rules only apply to social media like blogging. Woops. Radio and TV aren’t included.
The war between the tech giants continues, with a new battlefield emerging in the business applications arena. The New York Times Blog has broken a story stating that Google is planning a new application store to sell business software while promoting Google Apps. This is interesting, but not surprising, on several levels.
The rivalry between Microsoft and Google is not new, but Google Apps promises to bring the competition directly to one of Microsoft’s key doorsteps: business applications. With Bing hitting Google on the search front, Google is returning the favor by hitting MS on the biz app front.
Tom Krazit from CNet News says that the Google App store could come as soon as March. He posits that the new store will be part of the Google Solutions Marketplace, which would make sense.
Of course, Google is playing coy while at the same time apparently taking a cue from Apple’s marketing tactics, hoping to go viral with a key bit of leaked information. It seems to be working. Matt McGee of Search Engine Land makes the comparison directly, pointing out that one of the strengths of the iPhone is its proprietary app store.
Unlike Microsoft, however, it appears that the Google Apps Store would have third party software rather than proprietary offerings. This makes a financial model for the plan hard to figure, but it’s possible that Google could make money by taking a piece of each sale or indirectly through ads. Or maybe the goal is merely to get a big foot into the marketplace, displacing some the Seattle giant’s stronghold.
Either way, it’s definitely fun to watch as the giants of tech battle it out. I wonder what Apple’s reaction will be to all this?
This story broke over the weekend and got some real legs on it yesterday evening. Amazon and Macmillan publishing have been fighting about price points and electronic books and Amazon, apparently, has caved in to Macmillan on this. Unlike the rest of the buzz mongers, however, I’m going to tell you why this is a good thing.
On the surface, people like Henry Blodget at Business Insider are correct: this will mean higher prices for electronic books from Amazon. It also comes from others, like Jennifer Guevin at CNet News. The problem here isn’t with the reportage, it’s with where their information is coming from. Both of them (and many others like them) got most of their information from Amazon’s announcement on the deal. In this respect, Amazon pulled off a PR coupe.
Behind the scenes, however, is something a little more questionable and that makes this win for Macmillan a win for everyone else. Why? Because of the way that Amazon’s agreements work, which was the heart of this dispute. The price tag of the final deliverable was just the punching bag, the fists hitting it were Amazon’s publisher agreements and Macmillan’s refusal to bow to them.
To understand this, a rough understanding of the publishing world is required. Normally, before the Internet and Amazon.com, books were published, sold to wholesalers, then to distributors, then to book stores and then to customers. Eventually, wholesalers and distributors became one and the same. Then came Amazon.
Amazon acts as a wholesaler when dealing with the publisher and a book store to the rest of us. There’s nothing basically wrong with this, except that Amazon often marks up its titles as if it were the local book store, dropping a few points to be lower-priced by a couple of bucks. Thus a wholesale book might sell to Amazon for $5, but they’ll sell it to you for $19.99. The book store, which got it through a supply chain, has a cover price of $24.99.
Before Amazon, of course, large booksellers like Barnes & Noble and others were already acting as wholesalers. They were not, however, demanding exclusive rights or specific printing rights as part of the deal. Amazon, on the other hand, has hefty purchase requirements they want publishers to go along with, most of them revolving around the e-book version of the publication.
Up to now, publishers were willing to concede to this because, quite literally, Amazon was the only real e-book game in town. Now they aren’t and some publishers, like Macmillan, are beginning to question the exclusivity.
Which brings us to the current state of affairs. By asserting their ownership rights over the electronic version of their books (through price setting), Macmillan is telling Amazon that the monopoly is over. Of course, Amazon has a lot bigger audience to preach to, so they can get more of their story out to the public. Macmillan really only has publications like Publishers Marketplace, in which they took out an ad explaining their side of the bargain. Of course, most of us don’t read that publication, but many of us will get on the meme when Amazon’s announcement of their side of the story hits the ‘Net.
When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued new rules last October that govern how bloggers in the U.S. can publish endorsements or reviews of products for which they’ve received compensation, a lot of controversy ensued. Mainly because bloggers saw this as a direct attack on their ability to report on products or consumer services. At the time, however, most Netizens seemed to at least agree that the rules appeared to be fair across the board.
