California Governor Jerry Brown announced on Facebook his signing of two privacy laws protecting social media accounts.
“Today I am signing Assembly Bill 1844 and Senate Bill 1349, which prohibit universities and employers from demanding your email and social media passwords,” he wrote in the September 27 Facebook post. “These laws protect Californians from unwarranted invasions of their social media accounts.”
“AB 1844 was designed to prohibit employers from requiring an employee or job applicant to provide their username and password for social media accounts,” CNET reports. “Assemblymember Nora Campos, who authored the bill, called AB 1844 a ‘preemptive measure’ that will offer guidelines to the accessibility of private information behind what she calls the ‘social media wall.'”
There are more than 100 cases involving employer workplace policies around social media currently in front of the National Labor Relations Board. There has also been an increase in reports of employers trying to gain inappropriate access to Facebook accounts.
CNET cites the Michigan teacher’s aide that drew attention after being suspended for refusing to provide the school access to her Facebook account.
“SB 1349 is a companion bill to AB 1844,” the article explains, “and focuses on prohibiting colleges and universities from demanding social media usernames and passwords from students and prospective students.”
Social gifting is growing up. No longer just about virtual goods, digital gift-giving has evolved to allow friends to easily send physical items while also letting brands “become a part of the conversation between friends,” writes AllFacebook.
Following Facebook’s acquisition of gift card app Karma, the social network has launched Gifts, a native program to compete with Wrapp, Gifties and other social gifting services. It enables Facebook users to send physical gifts such as Gund teddy bears, Starbucks gift cards and Star Wars flash drives.
“The action appears next to Post and Photo options, above the prompt to write on a person’s timeline. The friend then fills in their address to receive the real-life gift (unlike SuperPoke, these presents are real),” the post explains. “Facebook also prompts users to give gifts when they click on a friend’s birthday announcement in the top-right corner of the news feed.”
In addition to reducing the friction of gift giving, social gifting aims to provide opportunities for advertisers.
According to Wrapp co-founder and COO Carl Fritjofsson, a gift card or personal message that comes from a personal contact holds more weight than a brand simply emailing a discount offer.
“For consumers, it’s all about casual gifting, as well as significant gifting. From a retailer’s prospective, it’s generating store traffic through very genuine and friend-to-friend contacts,” Fritjofsson says. “Facebook is essential to the way that we built our platform… We think that social gifting is definitely going digital, and Facebook is the natural way to facilitate that, because of the friendship graph.”
More than ten percent of Internet traffic is now on mobile devices, but mobile advertising still only accounts for less than two percent of all U.S. marketing spending.
“Mobile advertising has been touted as the next big thing since Apple’s iPhone debuted in 2007,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Yet the promise remained unfulfilled because marketing companies have to navigate consumers’ desires for privacy with the enticements mobile devices offer, such as fresh information about users’ location and spending habits.”
Because advertisers are slow to make the switch to mobile, ad rates have stayed relatively low.
“About half of all U.S. mobile ad spending goes toward search ads, more than the roughly 47 percent of total digital spending going into Web search, according to eMarketer. Google takes a 95 percent share of all mobile-search revenue in the U.S.,” notes the article.
Advertisers are attempting to create experiences that are useful or fun. Others have started taking advantage of increased smartphone screen sizes with “takeovers” that briefly fill most if not all of the screen. This technique should be used sparingly though, marketers say, because consumers may get annoyed.
Placing ads in unfamiliar places is another method to overcome “ad blindness.” Although it has had mixed results, Amazon sees some traction with its sleep-mode ads for its Kindle e-readers and tablets.
Lastly, “banner ads — the boxes or rectangular ads on many mobile websites or apps — are known as the ‘spray and pray’ approach. Marketers, consumers and companies all said these ads are cheap, crude and annoy mobile users. Still, banner ads account for nearly $2 of every $10 spent on U.S. mobile ads.”
“In a Pew Research Center survey of 3,003 U.S. adults, 17 percent said they accessed news on cell phone or tablet device the day before. Even more — 20 percent — said they regularly get news from social networks like Facebook or Google+,” Mashable reports.
The overall online consumption of news increased ten percentage points from 2008 with 39 percent of respondents accessing news online the day before.
Twitter was not a popular news source for most; only 13 percent of participants used Twitter at all compared to the 53 percent that used other social networks.
“Less than a quarter said they read a print newspaper the day before, about half the number who did in 2000,” Mashable writes. “Magazine readership has likewise declined, though at a softer rate: 18 percent said they read a magazine in print the day before, versus 26 percent in 2000. Book-reading has, at least, remained flat, but more Americans are now reading books through electronic or audio devices.”
Television remained the most common source of news for Americans with 55 percent of those surveyed saying they watched news on TV the day before. These people also spent the most time consuming news, 12 minutes more than mobile consumers.
“Where news consumption habits shift, ad dollars are likely to follow,” notes the post. “TV advertising levels, which so far have remained steady despite growing competition from online advertising outlets, could be negatively impacted should younger consumers continue to gravitate towards other channels.”
“Print, it is clear, still has a tough road ahead. The landscape for social networks and mobile looks promising, but only if marketers can figure out how to demand better ad rates for those channels.”
“People start out addicted to Facebook, and then become fatigued. On Twitter, they start out fatigued, and then become addicted,” tweeted The New York Times tech blogger Nick Bilton recently.
In Forbes, contributor Eric Jackson argues that this user interest threshold is true, and after years of being overshadowed by Facebook’s growth, Twitter will rise to the top while Facebook will fade away like MySpace.
Although the article notes Facebook leads in user base, valuation, revenues and IPO, Twitter has one distinctive win: “Twitter already has almost double the mobile revenue that Facebook has today, even though Facebook supposedly has 7x as many monthly average users. eMarketer says that Twitter will do $130 million in mobile ad revenues this year versus Facebook’s $70 million.”
Jackson says this is more important because the world is transitioning to mobile. Unlike Twitter which started as a mobile company — the 140 character limit is a carry-over from SMS limits — Facebook is based on websites and has had a hard time transitioning to mobile without feeling clunky.
“Advertisers will always want to corral users to go to their Facebook pages to keep that community within a walled garden the advertiser can study how they talk about their product,” Jackson suggests. “But, if the users don’t want to go there, they won’t go — and the advertisers will simply go where the users go and interact with them on their terms.”
Twitter has more of a “cool” factor and its interest graph is more valuable to advertisers than Facebook’s social graph.
YouTube wants to launch a new mobile music service that enables users to easily discover music via multiple categories, according to a new LinkedIn job posting.
The Google-owned video platform wants to create “new systems from the ground up that will generate millions of new music videos and surface YouTube’s music video catalog by artist, discography, and genre to users on mobile devices for the first time,” suggests the job posting for technical program manager.
YouTube has had some difficulty in the mobile space because not all of its content was available on its app.
“Previously, publishers were able to opt out of displaying their videos on mobile devices,” GigaOM explains. “Now, publishers can only block their videos from being displayed without ads — which means that a lot more monetized clips, including numerous music videos, are available on mobile devices.”
The site created its own iOS app after Apple’s YouTube app was removed in iOS6. The company must also compete with Vevo apps that separately run their own videos and advertising, even though Vevo is a YouTube content partner.
Even after OnLive’s difficulties, top cable and phone companies are looking to offer cloud gaming directly on televisions, sources say.
“If successful, Web-based games could accelerate a shift away from consoles, the industry’s main money maker for the past three decades,” reports Bloomberg. NPD notes that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo built a U.S. market worth $24.1 billion in 2011.
“Consumers are already dumping consoles in favor of games on smartphones and tablets, leading to a 39 percent decline in video-game hardware sales last month from a year earlier,” explains the article.
AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Cox Communications are all reportedly in talks to deliver video-gaming services. The sources also say that carriers are likely to start testing technologies this year for a rollout as early as next year.
“It makes perfect sense why they would want to go after this market,” says Mitch Lasky, former executive at Electronic Arts. “Streaming games use a ton of bandwidth and really benefit from good networks. But it’s a gnarly execution problem they’re trying to solve.”
“Carriers still have to get the technology in place,” the article states. “To stream games from remote servers to multiple devices simultaneously, they need to license virtualization technology. And to make the experience comparable to that of a console, they also must incorporate powerful graphics processors into their data centers, replacing chips used in consoles.”
Networking giant Cisco has started up a new team to “essentially re-imagine the way that onboard [car] systems connect,” reports Wired.
“We literally have reached out to every car company in the world,” says Helder Antunes, managing director of Cisco’s smart connected vehicles division. “What we would really like to do is to help standardize on the underlying networking platform and then allow them to innovate on the top.”
Cars use computers to operate digital devices like door locks, sensors or in-car televisions, but there isn’t a standard network for connecting these computers.
“The payoff would be a more connected car — one that can switch from 4G to wireless networks while simultaneously streaming a YouTube video to kids in the back without so much as a hiccup,” the article states.
“It would be a car that could get firmware updates over the air, and it would also be a lighter vehicle — one that used wireless connections and lighter Ethernet cables. In fact, Antunes thinks that a Cisco ‘Connected Vehicle’ could easily strip 70 to 80 pounds of cabling out of the car.”
Antunes’s team of 20 has already developed anti-crash systems using the Dedicated Short Range Communications car-to-car data-sharing protocol as well as prototyped a wireless system for police and firefighters. But the group may find it challenging to make their car network ubiquitous, due to the supply-chain complexity involved in developing automobiles.
European startup Brainient looks to “boost brand engagement and recognition” through interactive elements within online advertisements.
The company, which has enabled advertisers to tailor the same video campaign for computers, smartphones and tablets, is now taking interactive to a whole new level via the gesture-based Kinect controller for Microsoft’s Xbox.
Brainient CEO Emi Gal says now is the time for connected TVs. “Even though the Kinect technology has been with us for a while there wasn’t enough consumption on connected TVs in terms of video — and finally now we’re getting to the point where people are consuming video across smartphones, across online and across connected TVs more and more,” he tells TechCrunch.
Brainient has launched its first Kinect-enabled ad, which it is using as a showcase and a case study for the new ad technique. The ad is for the upcoming film “The Hobbit,” and it incorporates photo galleries and cast biographies, accessible with the swipe of your hand.
“By adding interactive elements to connected TV ads Brainient will be able to offer advertisers the ability to track brand engagement and recognition on the largest screen most consumers own — and the one they tend to ogle for longest,” TechCrunch writes.
Advertisers have historically targeted specific audiences and then sent their ads to TV shows with that same audience. Facebook jumped on this model, offering user data — gender, age, location, marital status, “interests” — to determine targeted audiences.
“All this extra data was supposed to be a gold mine for Facebook, and Facebook built up a huge ad sales apparatus to sell ads targeted with it,” Business Insider writes. “It turns out this whole tactic may have been a big waste of everyone’s time.”
Facebook has recently switched over to re-targeting, a strategy used by ad-sellers for years, which is much more valuable to advertisers — and much more profitable for Facebook.
Re-targeting has one crucial difference: intent. While targeted ads hope to entice viewers based on their perceived interests, re-targeting actually shows ads for products that users have already shown intent to buy.
The article explains how “cookie” software is downloaded when you visit product pages on retail sites. After you leave the site, you’ll see re-targeted ads of the items you’ve already investigated online — not just products that align with your Facebook “likes.”
The social giant sells re-targeted ads on the Facebook Exchange or FBX, where companies buy Facebook ad inventory and sell it to marketers using re-targeting.
“Zach Coelius, CEO of Triggit, one of the ad-reselling companies Facebook has invited onto FBX, says that return on investment for advertisers buying through FBX is so good, that if all of Facebook’s ad inventory were sold with re-targeting, instead of user data targeting, Facebook would be able to charge 3X the price it charges for ads right now,” explains the article.
“What’s truly remarkable is that inventory sold through FBX re-targeting uses ZERO Facebook profile data, and yet it is much more valuable.”
As smartphone adoption expands, users are not only switching their consumption of content over to mobile, but also increasing how much they consume. A new report from BI Intelligence shows how mobile technology has enticed consumers to “access more media than they otherwise would.”
Digital consumers tend to read more than print-only readers. The report found that 41 percent of tablet owners access books on their device.
Access to music is a primary motivation in adopting smartphones. “The percentage of all U.S. mobile users listening to music on their phones increased from 12 percent in September 2009 to 27 percent in May,” explains Business Insider. “Mobile digital music has not made up for the stagnant record sales, but it has helped fueled the rise of mobile-focused music companies. Mobile now accounts for 70 percent of Pandora’s traffic.”
Mobiles have also increased news consumption significantly, expanding the U.S. digital news audience by 17 percent last year. “Mobile readers go to news sites more often, spent more time per visit, and read more articles per visit than desktop readers,” notes the article.
Additionally, mobile users are increasingly watching long-form videos (not just YouTube clips) and using their devices as second or third screens.
Data transmission just got a whole lot faster. The record for capacity on conventional optical fiber has been defeated 10 times over.
Four organizations teamed up to test a new technology that enables 1 petabit — 1,000 terabits or the equivalent of 5,000 HDTV two-hour long videos — to be transmitted each second over a 52.4 km length of 12-core optical fiber.
The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) along with Fujikura Ltd, Hokkaido University and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) demonstrated this new ultra-large capacity transmission.
The breakthrough could have a dramatic effect on broadband services, an area increasingly stressed by expanded smartphone traffic.
“Efforts to increase the capacity of optical networks to accommodate surging traffic demand have largely focused on driving down infrastructure costs by using more efficient optical communications equipment to support more widespread deployment of broadband services without changing the structure of optical fiber itself,” NTT’s press release states.
“With further cooperation and development of these technologies that exploit the freedom of optical fiber spatial structures, optical amplification, and spectrally-efficient transmission technologies, this will open the way to even longer distance transmission and very large capacity optical networks that support the continued rollout of broadband services in the years ahead,” suggests the release.
Free Internet advocates and privacy protectors hail Do Not Track, while advertisers claim it will destroy the Internet as all content is supposedly funded through tracking-based ads.
“But according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the online advertising industry had revenue of $31.7 billion in 2011, and only about 15 percent of that, $4.9 billion, came from online behavioral advertising (OBA), ads that target consumers through personal information-powered tracking techniques and that are causing the privacy controversy,” writes attorney and privacy advocate Sarah A. Downey for TechCrunch.
Do Not Track is even less influential when you consider not all Internet users enable the tool; websites have no obligation to respond to a Do Not Track signal and most ignore it; Do Not Track doesn’t mean advertisers aren’t collecting and selling your data — they’re just not targeting you with ads; and finally, 80 percent of the money advertising makes from targeted advertising goes to improving targeted ads, NOT to content providers.
As the ad revenue increased 530 percent since 2002, people have become increasingly concerned about tracking, with 68 percent saying they’re not okay with tracking-based targeted ads and another 71 percent saying they’re very concerned about their information being sold or shared without their permission.
“We repeatedly hear that users want to understand what data is being collected, by whom, and how these companies might ultimately use it,” explains Downey. “These questions are the real unknowns that consumers care about and that advertising companies can’t answer. What is all this data they’re collecting, and where is it all going?”
Downey suggests that most advertising “doesn’t pose any privacy threat because it’s contextual, meaning it’s based on where the ad is placed, not on who sees the ad,” and recommends starting a dialogue on the issue.
There are an estimated 2.7 million books that are out-of-print and unavailable on e-readers. Converting these titles to digital could create $460 million in revenue for authors and publishers, according to a report from Carnegie Mellon.
“Even if sales are slow, once books are digitized, offering them continually to the public will cost almost nothing, a big contrast from the traditional cost of printing books and selling them in brick-and-mortar stores,” reports MarketWatch.
The Carnegie Mellon study anticipates sales to total around $740 million in the first year, which is equivalent to three percent of the publishing industry’s $27.2 billion revenue last year.
The process of digitizing these books is somewhat legally ambiguous. “Unlike typical back issues of newspapers and magazines, the legal status surrounding old books can be murky,” the article states. “In some cases ownership has reverted to authors; in others, new royalty rates need to be negotiated; and in still others it’s simply unclear. ‘Every contract is unique,’ says publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin.”
Even so, the conversion does hold high potential, the article states, noting author Barbara Freethy’s rise to the e-books best-seller list upon reissuing her old titles electronically.
Already, HarperCollins has published 23,000 of its titles digitally, and experts say other big publishers are likely to follow suit.
Following in the footsteps of Target, Walmart will no longer sell Amazon Kindle e-readers or tablets.
The company says the decision reflects its overall merchandising strategy, and that it will continue to sell other tablets — including Apple’s iPad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Google’s Nexus 7 and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab — along with e-readers and accessories.
Analysts speculate that Walmart’s decision arose from its retailing competition with Amazon. “Owners of Kindle tablets such as the new Kindle Fire HD can shop on the devices for millions of items beyond digital books. This allows Amazon to compete with stores on more lines of merchandise,” Reuters reports.
Also, Amazon is believed to receive thin profit margins on its Kindles, and as such cannot offer retailers much in the way of financial incentive.
Although Best Buy and Radio Shack have confirmed they will keep selling Amazon’s products, Target and Walmart are significant losses. “Now, with two large chains no longer selling Kindle, speculation has grown that the dominant online retailer could open its stores where shoppers could try out and buy Kindles,” the article states.