Three months ago, Forbes contributing writer Eric Jackson wrote an article projecting that Facebook and Google would not exist in their same mighty, dominant capacities in about 5-8 years time, because of the rapid rise of mobile commerce and activity.
At the time, he didn’t write much about Amazon, a company also vulnerable to the desktop-to-mobile shift. A powerhouse of online shopping, how will Amazon fare within the new landscape where people access shopping sites through mobile devices rather than desktops?
While Amazon and other giant companies are banking on the fact that people will access their sites on mobile devices in the same way they would on computers, evidence shows that’s not always the case.
“The reality is that we shop differently with our mobile devices compared to how we shop from our home office PC. The commerce companies who succeed will be the ones who understand the important differences and cater successfully to either the PC buyers or the mobile buyers (or both),” writes Jackson.
Jackson says it’s not about deals, but about immediacy and accessibility. There need to be opportunities for a shopper to take a photograph of a wanted dress and immediately identify the designer and where to purchase it online. It’s also about location and discovering deals close by.
Jackson notes that Pinterest and Etsy have promising mobile commerce models. He also extends congratulations to eBay for its quality iPad app and mobile commerce plan thus far.
Even so, Jackson predicts that it’s a yet un-invented mobile commerce app that will truly revolutionize the market. “My guess though… is that whoever is the leading mobile commerce app on smart phones and tablets for the next 15 years will get a pretty big valuation,” writes Jackson.
The brains behind Blogger and Twitter have released a new content publisher called Medium.
Evan Williams and Biz Stone co-founded Obvious, a company that helped create the popular platforms Blogger and Twitter. Williams and Stone hope their new project helps advance collaborative publishing and create a more polished product than their previous projects.
“Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information,” explains Williams, “but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others.”
The two are confident that Medium will mark an “evolutionary step” in Web publishing, reports Fast Company. And that step looks a lot like Pinterest, apparently.
As Fast Company describes it, Medium is “intended to be a Pinterest for our own lives, an elegant repository for photos, projects, and stories we’ve actually lived, as opposed to a re-blogged clearinghouse for pictures of wedding dresses and eggs baked into avocados found elsewhere around the Web.”
The user will post items and separate them into “collections” on a grid. Potential examples include “When I Was a Kid,” featuring childhood images and “This Happened To Me, a collection of amusing, inspiring, or unlikely real world anecdotes.”
The article discusses the pros and cons of a tile-based layout, suggesting that for Medium, the tile approach may be a great fit: “The tightly packed tiles serve to visually reinforce the idea that these photos and stories are part of a collection. If you’re flicking through a blog, a 200-word story titled ‘Beat-boxing saves lives’ probably wouldn’t grab your attention. But when it’s a tile in a collection headed ‘This Happened To Me,’ you automatically have a context that makes it a bit more compelling.”
Anyone with a Twitter account can check out Medium’s collections now, but posting is limited to a small group of beta testers.
“Much of our vision for Medium is just that — vision,” notes Stone. “Our ideas are much farther along than our product. Medium is only a sliver of what it could be.”
The International 3D Society (I3DS) and the 3D@Home Consortium, two of the industry’s top 3D organizations, are merging into a single association.
It is fittingly called the International 3D Society & 3D@Home, and will be made up of a merger of both existing teams, “comprising members in 20 countries and chapters in North America, China, Japan, Korea, Europe and the UK,” reports Variety.
“This newly formed organization will serve to spearhead the growth and expansion of the 3D entertainment industry across the entire ecosystem — from content conception and development, to consumer education and adoption,” says Tom Cosgrove, co-chair of the newly combined organization and CEO of 3net.
“From supporting content creators to educating consumers, our two groups have distinguished themselves in providing neutral, non-branded information,” adds Jim Mainard, past chair at I3DS and head of digital strategy at DreamWorks Animation. “Their combined power and scope will maximize our ability to steadily grow 3D across countless media platforms in education.”
The new organization, comprised of more than 60 companies and 500 individuals, will be led by I3DS CEO Jim Chabin. Studio and TV members include Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar, Sony, Turner Broadcasting, ESPN, BSkyB and National Geographic.
Other corporate members include Panasonic, Dolby Laboratories, XpanD 3D, RealD, 3ality Technica, Masterimage 3D, IMAX, Intel, THX, Samsung and others.
Two months after the launch of Airtime, the app has only 1,000 daily and 90,000 monthly active users, according to AppData. In order to make good on the $33.5 million fronted by its investors, Airtime desperately needs a jumpstart to its distribution method.
“Airtime planned to reach millions through real-time Facebook Chat invites to video calls,” reports TechCrunch. “But private messages can’t go viral, so two months after launch it’s hoping for growth through public video posts to Twitter and Facebook.”
Airtime has started a limited public release of the video posts, along with Twitter integration and its newly enhanced buddy list, in hopes that “Airtime users gain ways to tempt more friends to hop aboard, and not just one at a time,” explains the post.
The buddy list has been redesigned to include people in three categories: those currently logged into Airtime, those currently on Facebook but not Airtime and anyone else who is offline, making friend-finding much easier.
But is video-based social networking something that’s really going to take off? It’s different than the quickness of text and photo sharing.
“Video posts could certainly give people a reason to take some quick Airtime, but not if they drag on like a voicemail,” suggests the post. “It might take a time limit, or an entirely new type of interaction, but the products needs to feel lightweight. Because if users think the minimum session takes too long, they’ll never see how Airtime could humanize the Web through face-to-face interaction.”
According to sources close to the matter, “Apple is in talks with some of the biggest U.S. cable operators about letting consumers use an Apple device as a set-top box for live television and other content,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
As of yet, it doesn’t appear that Apple has made any deals, perhaps a sign of cable operators’ overall reluctance to allow Apple a solid foothold within the TV business.
According to WSJ, this move could indicate a shift in Apple’s approach to TV: “The talks illustrate that Apple is seeking a less radical path to expand in television than it has contemplated in the past, namely teaming up with existing service providers rather than licensing content to compete with them directly.”
As of now, Apple sell its $99 Apple TV, a box that allows for some Internet streaming onto TV sets, but not for live channels through cable operators. According to sources, this most recently discussed technology “could ultimately be embedded in a television.”
“For cable operators, the advantage of a deal with Apple is that it could allow them to reduce the money they spend buying set-top boxes, which are leased to customers for a monthly fee. It could also help them hang on to customers who can watch video through a growing array of Internet alternatives, as both traditional TV and Web video would be available through the same device,” suggests WSJ.
Businessweek spoke with Comcast CEO Brian Roberts about his company’s 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal and its future in an evolving business.
Speaking on the benefits of subscribing to Comcast rather than depending on a Netflix-type service, Roberts said: “We provide a breadth of live and catch-up content — what we define as this season’s content, none of which is available in the Netflix rerun world.”
“So from broadcast television to sports to news to the Grammys, the Olympics, this season’s episodes of ‘The Voice’ — all of those pieces of content and thousands of hours per month are not available on Netflix,” he notes. “So with all the press about cord-cutting, facts would say that [Netflix] has really been more additive. There are more multichannel video subscribers today than there were a year ago.”
Roberts believes “television will change more in the next five years than in the last 50. This will be really great for consumers,” he predicts, adding that “people want more control, more choice, and more personalization.”
He spoke on the $6 billion cost for the Olympics — and the $4 billion Comcast is expected to spend through 2020: “We paid a 1 percent increase over the prior Olympics for a decade of content and also received all media and technology rights to the Olympics for the next 10 years in the U.S. This means we have the rights to put Olympic content on all devices in and out of the home and even on devices that haven’t yet been invented.”
Roberts heralds Comcast for being ahead of the curve. “We were the first cable company or phone company to go all digital, and most of our customers now are digital… In each of the last seven quarters, we’ve added more new broadband subscribers than the previous quarter. So the pace of change at our company is accelerating, and there has never been a more exciting time to work here.”
In a 2-1 ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, it was ruled that law enforcement “has the right to obtain location data from a cellphone in order to track a suspect without a warrant,” reports Ars Technica.
In the case, an accused drug trafficker named Melvin Skinner claimed that the government’s use of GPS location information retrieved from his phone was a “warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”
“There is no Fourth Amendment violation because Skinner did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data given off by his voluntarily procured pay-as-you-go cell phone,” wrote Judge John Rogers. “If a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal.”
Judge Rogers referenced the 2012 Jones v. United States case, in which it was decided by the Supreme Court that law enforcement could not warrantlessly place GPS tracking devices on a suspect’s vehicle. He made the distinction that in this case, “no such physical intrusion occurred.”
“Here, the monitoring of the location of the contraband-carrying vehicle as it crossed the country is no more of a comprehensively invasive search than if instead the car was identified in Arizona and then tracked visually and the search handed off from one local authority to another as the vehicles progressed,” Rogers wrote.
Google’s decision to put sites with “high numbers of removal notices for infringing copyright” lower in its search results has somewhat appeased Hollywood while also raising “questions about fairness and the ability of suspected violators to challenge the move,” writes PCWorld.
While the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America applaud the move, advocates of Internet freedom aren’t so sure about it.
“It’s an interesting move by Google, which has long been criticized by Hollywood for its hands-off approach to copyright infringement,” notes the article.
Google says it can now get involved because of how often it receives copyright removal notices. “It says it is now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than it did in all of 2009 — more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone,” reports PCWorld.
But some groups are expressing concern. “In particular, we worry about the false positives problem,” notes the Electronic Frontier Foundation on its website. “For example, we’ve seen the government wrongly target sites that actually have a right to post the allegedly infringing material in question or otherwise legally display content. In short, without details on how Google’s process works, we have no reason to believe they won’t make similar, over-inclusive mistakes, dropping lawful, relevant speech lower in its search results without recourse for the speakers.”
The Atlantic writes about the software that “does the heavy lifting for the global economy,” which aren’t your favorite phone apps, but instead the “huge, creaky applications that run Walmart’s supply chain or United’s reservation system or a Toyota production line.”
But even more serious to consider are the software programs that run high-level financial systems, like Knight Capital, “which handled 11 percent of all U. S. stock trading this year” and “lost $440 million when its systems accidentally bought too much stock that it had to unload at a loss.”
“The underlying problem here is that most software is not very good,” explains the article. “Writing good software is hard. There are thousands of opportunities to make mistakes. More importantly, it’s difficult if not impossible to anticipate all the situations that a software program will be faced with.”
In order to address these concerns, companies need to hire qualified, dedicated developers and apply rigid, regularly scheduled software stress testing. However, these recommendations come at a cost and some financial institutions might be more willing to risk staying with current systems rather than investing more in these areas.
“The immediate problem is that as computer programs become more important to the financial system and hence the economy, there is insufficient incentive for trading firms to make sure their software works properly,” suggests The Atlantic.
Catastrophic software failure is viewed as low-probability, stress-testing software is expensive, and creating regulation ensuring good software is problematic.
“The only real solution is to acknowledge that computer programs are going to fail and try to minimize the damage they can cause in advance,” notes the article. “That could include a small trading tax to discourage high-frequency trading, or higher capital requirements to increase the odds that too-big-to-fail banks won’t blow themselves up.”
“Because what if this had happened at JP Morgan instead of at Knight Capital?”
It was common for the recently concluded 2012 Summer Olympic Games to be called “the first-ever social media Olympics,” and it lived up to that title, drawing more than 150 million tweets during its 16 days of competition, according to a Twitter blog post.
Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps and Tom Daley were the most popular athletes to tweet about. “Bolt’s gold medal-winning run in the 200 meters final drew a tweets per minute record of more than 80,000 for any competition,” according to Twitter.
But the Spice Girls’ appearance at the closing ceremonies faired even better, reaching more than 116,000 tweets per minute.
“Twitter also said that beyond Bolt, Phelps and Daley, seven other athletes drew more than 1 million tweets each during the Olympics. U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte, followed by gymnastics star Gabby Douglas rounded out the top five athletes in this regard,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The others were Andy Murray, Kobe Bryant, Yohan Blake, Lee Chong Wei and LeBron James.
In the year of the failed SOPA and PIPA legislation, a recently leaked report indicates that the RIAA’s Deputy General Counsel did not believe those bills would have been effective in dealing with music piracy.
RIAA CEO Cary Sherman wrote and spoke out in support of SOPA and PIPA at the time: “legislation that if passed would have removed infringing websites from the United States Internet,” according to TorrentFreak. “But quietly behind closed doors earlier this year one of the RIAA’s most senior lawyers admitted that the legislation would not have been effective against online piracy.”
In the leaked presentation document, RIAA Deputy General Counsel Victoria Sheckler admits that because of the viral online opposition to the bills, they were “essentially dead.”
But the document said more. According to TorrentFreak, “perhaps of most interest is the confession that even if they had passed, SOPA and PIPA would have been of little help to the music industry.”
The RIAA is instead focusing on the “six strikes” copyright enforcement, believing it is “robust enough to have a positive effect with its ‘consumer friendly’ approach.”
“Evidence exists that most users would modify their behavior if alerted to the risks associated with using certain P2P services and/or made to believe they will face consequences if caught infringing,” writes Sheckler.
According to a “Memorandum of Understanding, the RIAA is clearly aware that if they’ve issued infringement notices against an account holder six times, then that user has a good chance of being viewed as a ‘repeat infringer’ by their ISP — at least if prompted to do so by the RIAA” and could therefore suffer penalties including a slowed connection, possible disconnection, etc.
The important but little known Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), “is misleadingly labeled as a trade agreement, making it seem like a relatively narrow and limited agreement involving traditional topics like tariffs and exchange of goods — the sort of government-to-government discussions that seem too esoteric to have much impact on the everyday citizen,” writes Slate.
As explained by the United States Trade Representative, TPP is an “ambitious, next-generation, Asia-Pacific trade agreement that reflects U.S. priorities and values.”
President Obama has touted TPP, saying it will “boost our economies, lowering barriers to trade and investment, increasing exports, and creating more jobs for our people, which is my No. 1 priority.”
Based on recently leaked information, Slate suggests that TPP would enact “significant changes in U.S. and/or other signatory countries’ laws.”
It would also “curb public access to vast amounts of information in the name of combating intellectual property infringement (or piracy, depending on your choice of words). The owner of the copyright in a song or movie could use a ‘technological protection measure’ — what are often called ‘digital locks’ — to prevent your access to it, even for educational purposes, and regardless of whether the owner had the legal right to do so.”
There are more than 20 chapters within TPP, spanning subjects like “customs, cross-border services, telecommunications, government procurement, competition policy, and cooperation and capacity building” and more.
According to Slate, this is the “same closed-door mentality that killed the Stop Online Piracy Act and has led to the near death of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It likely will kill TPP if its negotiations do not change course. At a minimum, it will lead to an imbalanced and poorly drafted law.”
Researcher/hacker Charlie Miller works for security firm Accuvant and his research has been funded in part by DARPA. He spoke at last week’s Black Hat security conference regarding potential pitfalls of NFC technology.
Miller learned “that he could simply flash a near-field-communications (NFC) tag containing a chip next to an Android Nexus S phone to load a malicious URL in the phone’s browser through a feature that Google calls Android Beam,” according to Forbes.
NFC allows smartphone users to pay bills wirelessly and sync with nearby computers, among other things, but it could also be putting users in danger of viruses and/or data theft.
“The whole idea of Android Beam is that if you both have Android phones, you can share a game you’re playing or a Web page or something on Maps,” explains Miller. “But the scary thing is that with just an NFC tag I can make your browser open a Web page and completely own your phone.”
The vulnerabilities Miller showcased have been addressed in Android’s 4.01 version of its Android Beam, but up to 90 percent of users haven’t updated to that version, according to the article.
Miller highlighted similar security risks with some Nokia and Android phones, focusing on what happens when certain applications run NFC-enabled software.
“Once you realize NFC opens the gateway to the browser and other big attacks surfaces, I thought, why waste time exploiting these NFC bugs,” he says. “As an attacker I wouldn’t look for NFC bugs but instead focus on other applications that you can get to run using NFC.”
File-sharing service BitTorrent is on a mission to “help artists monetize the BitTorrent ecosystem” — a system of 150 million users that most often download free songs and episodes without consideration for how it affects the content creator.
“BitTorrent Inc. hopes to change this with a new revenue model that supports collaborating artists while keeping content at its desired price (free),” reports Slate.
Last week, BitTorrent began offering a free download bundle that “pairs exclusive music and photos from hip-hop producer DJ Shadow with a free, optional install of RealPlayer,” according to the article.
This is part of a plan that BitTorrent hopes will “be a new way of distributing content, one that allows artists to profit without asking downloaders to pay up. Each bundle will come with software — like a media player or anti-virus program — and that’s where the money comes in.”
If the user decides to install the program, the software vendor will pay an advertising fee to be shared between BitTorrent and the featured artist.
However, Slate poses some legitimate questions: “Will BitTorrent’s experiment pan out? Even if ad revenue is enough to satisfy everyone’s piggy banks, its success relies on users actually downloading the sponsored software. And how many of your friends do you see using RealPlayer?”
NBC provided 171 hours of programming for the Atlanta games 16 years ago, and this year will offer about 5,535 hours via online streaming, TV and cable. Yet the network has received some criticism for its decisions to delay coverage of events and require a cable subscription for those wanting to stream events live online.
“At the Sydney Olympics in 2000, broadband wasn’t widely available. In Athens in 2004, the smartphone was in its infancy. In Beijing four years ago, social networks had not yet exploded,” notes Wired. “Today, all three have dovetailed in a crush of information.”
That perfect storm has left NBC is a tough position. It wants viewers to tune into its primetime broadcasts each night, and so is delaying some of its coverage, but many people don’t watch TV that way anymore. It’s too easy (and almost unavoidable) to learn results prior to primetime.
“CBS gets it,” notes Forbes in a related article. “Their telecast of the Grammy’s earlier this year grabbed the largest audience since 1984, mainly because of the vast back-channel conversation blasting through Twitter and Facebook. It was snarky, it was goofy, it was great fun — but you had to watch live to participate.”
However, the Grammy coverage involves a single event that doesn’t face the same challenges in covering multiple daily events from another country that lasts weeks. The Wall Street Journal noted in its review that the approach is “forcing Olympics lovers to consider the unthinkable — staying off the Internet for much of the games’ 17-day span to avoid spoilers.”
As Forbes notes, Olympic-themed tweets may be trending on Twitter in real time, but users are likely unable to watch those events until much later, making it difficult for users to engage socially — a significant component of modern TV viewing.
“I don’t pretend that everything will be perfect,” said Mark Lazarus, head of NBC Sports Group. But the number of people tuning in “is a great early sign that our strategy of driving people to watch NBC in primetime is working.”
This is historic for NBC, marking the first time the network is streaming all of the Olympic events. “On Sunday, 11.4 million videos were watched on NBCOlympics.com, and about half of them were watched live,” notes WSJ. “That is almost triple the number from Beijing on its first Sunday of competition.”
