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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/31/angela-merkel-rebukes-trump-politics-harvard-commencement-speech/1298475001/
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Merkel rebukes Trump politics in Harvard commencement speech: 'Tear down walls of ignorance'
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Merkel rebukes Trump politics in Harvard commencement speech: 'Tear down walls of ignorance'
BOSTON — German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected President Donald Trump's brand of politics and worldview in a commencement speech Thursday at Harvard University, calling for global, not national, thinking and working together, not in isolation.
“I want to leave this wish with you," Merkel said near the end of her 35-minute speech, breaking out of her native tongue to speak in English without a translator. "Tear down walls of ignorance and narrow-mindedness, for nothing has to stay as it is."
The line — evoking former President Ronald Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech — was met with a standing ovation among the Harvard graduates, faculty and others who watched the university's 368th commencement from Harvard Yard.
Merkel, the chancellor of Germany since 2005, never mentioned the president by name, but he was a clear target with her central theme being breaking down "walls." One of Trump's defining policy proposals is a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
More:Federal judge partially halts Trump border wall funding, blocks $1 billion
Her rebuke was most pointed on foreign policy. Trump has challenged the traditional Western alliance that first emerged following World War II by questioning America's role in the North Atlantic Trade Organization. He's said NATO has benefited Europe more than the U.S.
“Changes for the better are possible if we tackle them together," Merkel said, pointing to climate change, navigating the digital transformation and ending wars and displacement as some of the world's top challenges. "If we want to go it alone, we could not achieve much."
“More than ever, our way of thinking and our actions have to be multilateral rather than unilateral, global rather than national, outward-looking rather than isolationist. In short, we have to work together, rather than alone.”
Merkel slammed Trump's approach to trade as well, telling the crowd, "Protectionism and trade conflicts jeopardize free international trade and thus the very foundations of our prosperity.” Trump has engaged in trade wars by increasing tariffs on exports from China and threatening to do the same with Mexico.
More:Trump announces tariffs on Mexico in effort to stop migrants coming to the US
In other digs at Trump, the chancellor warned against acting on "first impulses" and to value honesty.
“I have learned that we can find good answers even to difficult questions if we always try to view the world through the eyes of others, if we respect other people’s history, traditions, religion and identity," Merkel said. "If we hold fast to our inalienable values and act in accordance with them.
"And if we don’t always act on our first impulses even when there is pressure to make a snap decision. But instead take a moment to stop, be still, think, pause."
She continued: "Granted, that certainly takes courage," drawing some laughs among the audience. "Above all, it calls for truthfulness in our attitude toward others. And perhaps most importantly, it calls for us to be honest with ourselves."
Drawing another standing ovation, she said the "maxim of truth" requires us "not to describe lies as truth and truth as lies."
TRUMP:President calls Germany 'captive to Russia'
The focus on "walls" began at the beginning of her speech when Merkel traced her upbringing in Communist-controlled East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which she grew up near. She said the people in 1989 brought it down – something she once thought was not possible.
"Where there was once only a dark wall, a door opened," said Merkel, who started her professional career as a young physicist before entering politics.
She told Harvard's graduating class of 2019 to never take freedom or individual liberties for granted and to prioritize people and human dignity as technology advances.
And she kept returning to that word.
"Walls," she warned them, are what could stop them from solving the world's problems – walls between family members, between groups and between people of different races, nations and religions.
"I would like to see us break down these walls – walls that keep preventing us from envisioning the world in which together we want to live. Whether we manage to do that is up to us."
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aaac5a1fadbf2b9e2c6e01fd31f550c0
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/31/arkansas-flood-levee-breach-prompts-evacuations-north-little-rock/1297285001/
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Arkansas River bursts through levee north of Little Rock, triggering evacuations
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Arkansas River bursts through levee north of Little Rock, triggering evacuations
TULSA, Oklahoma – The swollen Arkansas River ripped through a 40-foot section of a levee about 75 miles northwest of Little Rock, Arkansas, early Friday morning, prompting flash-flood warnings and evacuations in rural areas around Dardanelle and Holla Bend.
The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning in the area, warning that some 5,700 people, four schools and a hospital were potentially exposed to the flooding. The NWS urged people to move to higher ground.
“Water is going to do what it wants to do,” Yell County Judge Mark Thone told reporters at a news conference. “We’re just trying to head this off.”
Jimmy Witt, mayor of Dardanelle, called on the 4,500 residents of his town to begin immediate sandbagging operations. He said he expected water to encroach the town "from the bayou side."
"I ask you to please not panic, we have time to prepare for this," Witt said on his Facebook page.
The weather service noted a slight dip in the water level for the levee at Dardanelle, likely due to the breach.
"An historic flood event is expected along the Arkansas River in the coming days," warned the weather service in Little Rock. "Some long-time record crests could be surpassed by five feet above the record set in 1945."
This is the same river that's flooded hundreds of homes in the Tulsa area, and the high water is rolling downstream as the Arkansas River makes its way to its confluence with the Mississippi River and then down into the Gulf of Mexico. Authorities say flooding danger will rise through at least the weekend along the river.
Arkansas authorities urged residents to evacuate the area, which is largely rural with dirt roads crisscrossing farm fields.
Drone footage published by the Yell County Sheriff's Department showed the muddy water streaming through the dirt levee, surrounding several buildings with several feet of water. Yell County officials had anticipated the breakthrough and urged residents in about 160 homes in the nearby Holla Bend area to evacuate Thursday.
Emergency management officials say crews were going door-to-door to recommend evacuation for about 160 homes.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson, along with several federal lawmakers, surveyed the inundated area by air on Thursday and said more than 500 homes have been affected by flooding.
"As I flew over today, the most significant impression I had is that it's hard to imagine the magnitude of the flooding," Hutchinson told reporters in Fort Smith. "It is hard to comprehend. We have never seen this before, and we have never had to deal with this before."
At least one person, a 64-year-old man, has died in the flooding. He died on Tuesday after apparently ignoring a barricade at roadway near Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. His body was found in a submerged vehicle.
The Arkansas River began rising sharply after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released water from a swollen lake near Tulsa that had risen sharply due to heavy rains in Oklahoma and Kansas.
In Tulsa, authorities say the lowering water levels may reveal damage to the levees, which have been soaked for days. On Friday, they announced a 20-foot-deep sinkhole had opened beneath a street.
Weather service officials have said flooding will continue along the river as water crests on its way downstream over the next week toward the Mississippi River.
Earlier this year, about two dozen levee systems were breached or overtopped during Missouri River flooding that devastated parts of Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri.
Contributing: Associated Press
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2d08c3f4e95b1de6d4e962d09731d61a
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/31/hurricane-season-starts-saturday-tropical-storm-could-form-gulf/1302947001/
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Hurricane season starts Saturday as forecasters eye developing system in the Gulf of Mexico
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Hurricane season starts Saturday as forecasters eye developing system in the Gulf of Mexico
The 2019 Atlantic hurricane season officially starts Saturday, and, as if on cue, a storm could form in the Gulf of Mexico over the next few days, forecasters said.
The National Hurricane Center said the system is expected to move over the southern Gulf of Mexico this weekend.
"Some gradual development of this system is possible through early next week as
long as it remains over water," the hurricane center said. "Regardless of development, the disturbance will likely produce heavy rainfall over portions of southern Mexico during the next few days."
If the system's wind speeds reach 39 mph, it would become Tropical Storm Barry. The hurricane center is giving the system a 30% chance of development.
The six-month hurricane season is predicted to be near-normal by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with 9 to 15 named tropical storms expected to form. Of those, 4 to 8 should strengthen into hurricanes.
A tropical storm becomes a hurricane once its sustained winds reach 74 mph. A typical season sees 12 tropical storms, of which 6 become hurricanes.
In April, meteorologists at Colorado State University estimated 13 tropical storms will form, 5 of which will become hurricanes.
If it forms, Barry would be the second named storm of the season. Andrea, a subtropical storm, formed in the Atlantic, then spun harmlessly out to sea last week.
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71c3ffc31db4a3d8d57ea161c9da5fb0
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/31/iowa-severe-weather-tornado-storm-kids-baseball-game/1298219001/
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Kids keep baseball game going even as tornado moves through the area
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Kids keep baseball game going even as tornado moves through the area
DES MOINES, Iowa – What do young Iowa baseball players and their families do when a tornado looms in the distance? Play ball.
At least that's what a Little League team of fifth- and sixth-graders in the eastern Iowa town of Montezuma did earlier this week.
Jamie Brennan, a parent at the game, took a video of the curious scene while the young ballplayers continued with their warm-ups as a tornado looms in the background.
"The tornado appeared very quickly and also disappeared fairly quickly as well," Brennan said. "The game before ours was canceled due to potential tornadoes. By the time it was our turn, everyone thought the storm had passed. When they were warming up, it was clear outside – there was no lightning, rain, wind or anything."
The Quad Cities (Iowa) National Weather Service did confirm the presence of a twister Wednesday that injured a man in Poweshiek County and damaged a farmstead, which would place it squarely in the Montezuma area. No other tornado-related injuries have been reported.
"I know the video appears careless, but there were many people there and no one was panicking," Brennan said, remarking on the criticism she's received on social media after filming the incident. "If I felt like it was a dangerous situation, I would have removed my child from the field immediately."
For some, just seeing a tornado may be cause to run for the nearest shelter. For these Iowans, though, a little tornado a long way off was no cause for alarm.
Follow Aaron Calvin on Twitter: @aaronpcalvin
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68ffb7cdecd626304ef8d1b6a2bce25c
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/31/legal-marijuana-illinois-could-become-11-th-state-legalize-weed/1305090001/
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Illinois poised to legalize marijuana sales, expunge criminal records for pot crimes
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Illinois poised to legalize marijuana sales, expunge criminal records for pot crimes
Illinois is poised to legalize marijuana sales with sweeping legislation that would also automatically expunge the criminal records of people convicted of minor pot possession.
State lawmakers gave final approval to the bill Friday and Gov. JB Pritzker said he will sign the measure, which make Illinois the first state to legalize marijuana sales via its legislature. Most other states that have legalized cannabis did so via a ballot initiative process. Vermont's legislature legalized cannabis but prohibited commercial sales.
"This will have a transformational impact on our state, creating opportunity in the communities that need it most and giving so many a second chance," Pritzker said in a statement. "In the interest of equity and criminal justice reform, I look forward to signing this monumental legislation."
Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, but federal prosecutors have since 2014 generally ignored marijuana sales in 10 states that had already legalized it: Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Nevada, Vermont and Washington, along with the District of Columbia.
Prizker's office didn't give a timeframe for when he might sign the law, which would go into effect Jan. 1, 2020. Under the system, adults could buy and possess up to 30 grams of cannabis "flower," along with marijuana-infused foods known as edibles, and small amounts of highly concentrated extracts. Non-residents could buy half the amount.
The law also establishes a system for taxing and regulating marijuana, and consumers would pay up to 34.75% tax on their purchases, depending on potency. Regulators would give preference points to members of minority groups seeking to get business licenses, and state-certified labs would test products for potency and contaminants, a growing concern among users. Backers say the measure will create jobs in communities around the state, an argument made by Canadian officials when they legalized marijuana nationally last year.
Money raised by the new taxes would first be dedicated to expunging an estimated 770,000 minor cannabis-related cases, according to the bill's language. Expungement has long been a goal of marijuana-legalization advocates, who argued the federal government's so-called War on Drugs disproportionately targeted minorities. Other states have similar provisions, usually added after the fact, but Illinois' law is the first to contain such a sweeping expungement provision from the start.
Any tax money left over after would be used to support drug-treatment and enforcement programs, improve mental health counseling access, and bolster the state's general fund.
"Cannabis was at the heart of our nation's disastrous War on Drugs. This is a measure that will improve people's lives on a level commensurate with the devastation wrought by prohibition," said Steve Hawkins, executive director for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, which worked with lawmakers and Pritzker to write the law. "Illinois is on the brink of replacing a shameful, destructive policy with the most far-reaching cannabis law ever enacted."
Several other states had considered but ultimately declined to act on legalization this year, including New York and New Jersey. Pritzker, who took office in January, campaigned on a platform that included cannabis legalization. His cousin is a member of the MPP board and an investor in multiple cannabis companies, although the governor's office said the two men haven't discussed legalization recently.
Anti-legalization groups had fought the Illinois proposal and promised they weren't done opposing it. "Tough to win in a state where the Gov shares the same last name as MPP’s chair," tweeted Kevin Sabet of the group Smart Approaches to Marijuana. "But there’s more to come. We’re not going to let the Land of Lincoln go to pot just yet."
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0464b2541e7103e178f324a4441a53c1
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/31/masterminds-accountant-agrees-plead-guilty-college-admissions-scandal/1304526001/
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Mastermind's accountant agrees to plead guilty in college admissions scandal
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Mastermind's accountant agrees to plead guilty in college admissions scandal
BOSTON — The former bookkeeper of the sham nonprofit led by Rick Singer, the mastermind of the nation's college admissions bribery scandal, has agreed to plead guilty to charges and cooperate with the government.
In a deal with federal prosecutors filed late Friday, Steven Masera, who worked as the accountant and financial officer for Singer's Key Worldwide Foundation and his Edge College and Career Network LLC, has agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit racketeering.
Masera, 69, faces a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000, but the Justice Department has recommended between 57 and 71 months because of his guilty plea. In addition, prosecutors have recommended one year of supervised release, as well as undetermined amounts of restitution and forfeiture.
More:Felicity Huffman is just the beginning: Who's pleaded guilty in the college admissions scandal — and who's still fighting
With his cooperation deal, Masera has agreed to cooperate fully with investigators and prosecutors. That includes furnishing them with all documents, objects and other evidence in his possession.
Prosecutors say Singer and his nonprofit took in more than $25 million in payments from rich parents since 2011 to help get their children into some of the nation's finest colleges. He either funneled portions of the money to test proctors and others to facilitate cheating on the ACT or SAT or to coaches to get the children into college as falsified athletic recruits.
More:Inside Rick Singer's college admissions network: An ex-con half brother, a Welsh soccer team and a former NFL owner
It was often Masera, according to prosecutors, who oversaw the transactions on Singer's behalf, sending notices to parents for their purported "donation "or "pledge" to the Key Worldwide Foundation.
Singer, Masera's former boss, pleaded guilty to an assortment of charges when the Justice Department announced the scandal in March. He's been cooperating with prosecutors throughout much of the investigation that began last year.
Another of Singer's former employees, Mikaela Sanford, has pleaded not guilty to racketeering charges.
More:Parenting guru, 2 others plead guilty to paying bribes to get kids better ACT scores
Sanford and other defendants who have pleaded not guilty in the sweeping conspiracy case have a status conference hearing in Boston federal court Monday. At the procedural hearing, their attorneys are expected to establish the timeline for the release of additional discovery evidence, pretrial motions and other considerations.
Nineteen out of 50 defendants in the "Varsity Blues" scandal – including parents, coaches, the scheme's test-taker and others – have already pleaded guilty to charges in court. One additional parent has agreed to plead guilty but awaits a plea hearing in June.
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b089b9aa06273ff670ce7e237db2d691
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/31/otter-dies-after-guests-feed-human-food-kingsport-tennessee/1302973001/
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An orphaned otter named Otto died after guests threw human food into his enclosure
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An orphaned otter named Otto died after guests threw human food into his enclosure
KINGSPORT, Tennessee – An otter named "Otto" has died after guests at a Tennessee park fed the animal food it could not tolerate.
Bays Mountain Park & Planetarium announced Thursday in a Facebook post that Otto was on his way to an animal hospital after park guests threw food into his enclosure. The post stated that Otto's body could not tolerate the food that was given to him. It was updated later to announce that Otto had died.
The post also reminds guests of the park to avoid this mistake in the future, stating, "Feeding the animals at Bays Mountain Park is strictly prohibited for exactly this reason. Human food is often intolerable and, in this case, even harmful to our animals."
In another post, the park said an autopsy will be performed on Otto to determine the exact cause of death.
May 31:Eleven-foot alligator breaks into Florida home, greets police with open jaw in kitchen
April 11:Otter pup being hand-reared at Chicago zoo
According to the post, Otto first came to the park in October 2017 as a 9-month-old after being housed at a rehabilitation facility in North Carolina. The facility looked after the otter and his sibling after their parents died in a flood.
"Otto was beloved by park staff and guests alike," the post reads. "A cheerful creature, he could often be found swimming or playing with toys in his pool, even when it was snowing outside."
Bays Mountain is a 3,550-acre nature park, which features cave systems and wildlife.
Follow Andrew Wigdor on Twitter @andrew_wigdor
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b7bed59602ef0bde06059d87d8657255
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/31/police-shooter-opens-fire-virginia-beach-courthouse/1305277001/
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'War zone': 12 killed in Virginia Beach shooting at municipal center; gunman dead after long gun battle
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'War zone': 12 killed in Virginia Beach shooting at municipal center; gunman dead after long gun battle
A longtime public utilities employee opened fire on co-workers at a municipal center in Virginia Beach on Friday, killing 12 people and wounding at least four others before police fatally shot him in a heated gun battle.
Virginia Beach police Chief Jim Cervera said the heavily armed shooter died in an exchange of gunfire with four officers who rushed into the building. The gunman was armed with a .45 caliber handgun and he exhausted multiple extended magazines in the onslaught, leaving a "war zone" of carnage, spent bullets and empty ammunition casings, Cervera said.
Cervera said the gunman walked into the Virginia Beach Municipal Center - where up to 400 people work - shortly after 4 p.m. EDT and "immediately began to indiscriminately fire upon all the victims." His name has not yet been released because police said they have been unable to notify his relatives.
"The officers stopped this individual from committing more carnage," Cervera said. The gunman likely would have used all his ammunition on innocent people had the officers not engaged him in the gun battle, forcing him to use up the massive store of ammunition that he brought on his killing mission, the chief said.
Among the wounded: a Virginia Beach Police officer whose life was saved by his bulletproof vest, Cervera said.
Police also say the gunman brought extended ammunition magazines that held more bullets than a typical magazine, suggesting that he wanted as much firepower as possible to inflict damage inside the building.
He also had a sound suppressor for his handgun. Unlike some states, silencers are legal in Virginia, though it is illegal to have one in Virginia Beach per local ordinance.
More:What we know so far about the Virginia Beach shooting
The nation's latest mass shooting sent alarm and shock throughout Virginia Beach, a popular resort town with a population of 440,000. The municipal center is several miles from the resort areas of the beach, located along the Atlantic Coast about 200 miles south of Washington, D.C. The community is also home to three military bases.
"This is the most devastating day in the history of Virginia Beach," Mayor Bobby Dyer said. "The people involved are our friends, coworkers, neighbors and colleagues."
The extent of the injuries to survivors is still unclear. Four patients were undergoing surgery late Friday at Sentara Virginia Beach General Hospital. Initially, police said 11 victims had died, but a 12th died on their way to the hospital.
"We're still trying to figure it out," Dyer said of the victims and their injuries. "There is obviously a lot of chaos and confusion."
The gunman himself was among the wounded after the gun battle. Officers were in the midst of bringing him out of the building when he died of his wounds, Cervera said.
Christina Pullen, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Norfolk, said the bureau is responding to assist Virginia Beach police.
The shooting broke out in Building No., 2 of the sprawling Virginia Beach Municipal Center, which includes several city facilities, including the police department. Building 2 houses offices for planning and public works and is adjacent to city hall.
Megan Banton, an administrative assistant who works in the building where the shooting broke out, said she heard gunshots, called 911 and barricaded a door.
“We tried to do everything we could to keep everybody safe,” she said. “We were all just terrified. It felt like it wasn’t real, like we were in a dream. You are just terrified because all you can hear is the gunshots.”
Sheila Cook, an employee, said workers heard shooting but didn't think it was so close. She told reporters that police were able to alert them quickly to give them time to leave the building.
"I am still shaken, because there is entirely too much killing going on," Cook said.
Zand Bakhtiari told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper that the gunfire thundered in swift succession, sounding like an automatic weapon. “It was repeated, rapid gunfire,” said Bakhtiari, who said he was one of only five people left in the IT department on the first floor of the building at the end of the day. He was warned by his supervisor, who had left the office and texted to say there was an active shooter and people should shelter in place.
After a few minutes the flurry of bullets seemed to stop, he said, but the fire alarm went off and he could smell gunpowder. After about 10 minutes SWAT team members and police escorted Bakhatiari and his co-workers to safety, he told the paper.
Arthur Felton, an 18-year employee in the planning department, told the Virginian-Pilot he was able to evacuate after a co-worker heard gunshots. A shaken Felton said he “never thought this would happen in my building. The people who were shot – I’m sure I know most of them.”
City Councilwoman Barbara Henley had just arrived at the City Hall building right after 4 p.m. when she heard sirens and assumed there had been an accident, she told the Virginian-Pilot.
After exiting her car, Henley said she was told by employees outside there was a shooting as they urged her to leave. She said she heard someone shout “Get down!” as she got back in her car. “I was scared to death.”
Henley told the paper security had been increased recently at the City Hall building but said some other city buildings don’t follow the same security measures.
Survivors of the shooting were reuniting Friday evening with friends and relatives at a middle school.
Paul Swain was among those who arrived at the Princess Anne Middle School to reunite with loved ones who were in the municipal building during the shooting. Swain said he saw his fiancee across the parking lot, clearly in an agitated state. He said he thinks she knew some of the people who were hurt or killed.
The school’s parking lot was filled with police and civilian vehicles.
Cervera praised first responders for their actions. "When this violent act occurred, police and fire-rescue responded and did the professional thing that they do, because that's what they do," he said.
Cervera also said that citizens can "rest easy" tonight after the suspect was taken down.
"This day will not define Virginia Beach, our response will define Virginia Beach," Councilman Aaron Rouse said. "We will come together, we will show the strength of our city."
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who rushed to the scene, said it was an "horrific day" for the community and that "This is unspeakable, senseless violence."
The mayor of Aurora, Illinois, where six people were killed in a shooting in February, said people in his community "mourn for the victims of this senseless mass shooting."
Virginia Beach Council member Aaron Rouse was a student at Virginia Tech when 33 people died in a mass shooting at the Blacksburg school in 2007. He told CNN he was “in shock” when he learned of Friday’s rampage, and it hit close to home. “I immediately jumped into ‘not again, this cannot happen again, I can’t believe this happened again.’”
Rouse, who saluted the valiant first responders on Friday, said he went from feeling sorry and helpless during college to knowing that in his role as a councilman he could help have “those tough conversations” about ways to end gun violence and make communities safer. “We must learn from the mistakes of our past. We cannot show fear; our leaders have to stand up.”
Rouse said a good way to start was to open minds and hearts and have more tolerance for people. Mass shootings affect everyone, no matter where they happen, he told CNN. “We were Virginia Tech strong, now we are Virginia Beach strong.”
Contributing: Susan Miller and the Associated Press
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d33899f37f688b053da862921704df0d
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/31/see-inside-sandra-lee-and-andrew-cuomo-house-listed-2-million/1305723001/
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See inside Sandra Lee and Andrew Cuomo house listed for $2 million
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See inside Sandra Lee and Andrew Cuomo house listed for $2 million
The Lee/Cuomo house was listed for $2 million, about $300,000 less than previously reported.
NEW CASTLE, N.Y. – TV personality Sandra Lee rose to stardom with her semi-homemade cooking, but her talent is not limited to her kitchen.
She's got taste in home decor, and it shows in her property's listing photos made available by Houlihan Lawrence.
Lee's four-bedroom Colonial that she had shared with her longtime partner, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has been listed for $2 million since May 24. The price is $300,000 less than previously reported.
"They did good," said Matthew Gluck, founder of NestEdge Realty in Chappaqua, of the pricing. "I didn't want them to go higher than that. It's right around $2 million. I think they'll have good traffic."
Gluck's sentiment stems from the recent slowdown in the sales of homes priced above $2 million: The luxury home market has suffered a 43% sales decline in the first quarter of 2019 compared with the same period last year, according to Houlihan Lawrence's luxury market report,
Harriet Libov, associate real estate broker with Houlihan Lawrence's Armonk office, has the listing. Libov did not return phone and email messages seeking comment.
Over the years, the house at 4 Bittersweet Lane in New Castle, named Lily Pond, has been featured in various publications as a backdrop for Lee's home decoration ideas.
Most recently, the house was featured in People magazine.
“Every single thing in this house I’ve personally purchased," Lee told the magazine, noting that it took a decade for her to put everything together.
In addition to the kitchen as well as the living and dining rooms featured in the magazine, the listing photos include the home's bedrooms, a large walk-in closet, gym, and family room with brick fireplace.
In 2008, Lee, author of the best-selling cookbook "Semi-Homemade Cooking," purchased the house for $1.22 million, according to property records. Lee is the sole owner, though Cuomo has long said he shares all household expenses.
Twitter: @AskAkiko
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822d5595e25072e8ad1837e779fcdc6a
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/31/watchdog-finds-dangerous-overcrowding-el-paso-border-patrol-stations/1300906001/
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'Dangerous overcrowding': 900 migrants cram into Border Patrol center designed for 125 people
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'Dangerous overcrowding': 900 migrants cram into Border Patrol center designed for 125 people
The surge of Central American migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border has led to "dangerous overcrowding" and unsanitary conditions at Border Patrol stations around El Paso, Texas, according to a government watchdog report released Thursday.
Inspectors highlighted the El Paso Del Norte Processing Center, which was designed to hold 125 people but was crammed with 750 migrants on May 7 and 900 migrants the following day, according to the report from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General.
The report includes photos of dozens of migrants squeezed together in holding cells and hundreds of migrants massed in the center's outdoor parking lot as they waited to be processed. Border Patrol agents told inspectors that some migrants were forced to stand "for days or weeks" because there wasn't enough room to sit on the floor. Some migrants even stood on toilets "to make room and gain breathing space." CNN first reported the story Friday.
The situation has become so dire that the inspectors had only one recommendation for Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol: Take "immediate steps" to alleviate the overcrowding.
"Although CBP headquarters management has been aware of the situation ... for months and detailed staff to assist with custody management, DHS has not identified a process to alleviate issues with overcrowding," the report concludes.
U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Border Patrol officials have warned Congress for months that they faced an unprecedented surge of asylum-seeking migrants. Yet the report shows, according to Thompson, that Border Patrol officials "completely and utterly failed" to prepare for the very surge they warned about, leading to the dangerous conditions inspectors found.
"The findings serve as further evidence that the Trump Administration is not just neglecting to address the crisis – they are, in fact, exacerbating it," Thompson said in a statement.
The Trump administration struggles to prevent Central American migrants from coming to the USA and to properly care for them once they arrive.
The administration has tried several maneuvers to cut off or limit asylum requests – some were blocked by federal courts, some were allowed to go into effect. Thursday, President Donald Trump tried a new tact, threatening to impose an escalating series of tariffs on Mexican imports if the Mexican government does not completely stop Central American migrants moving through that country on their way toward the USA.
Those efforts haven't worked as a record number of families and children cross the border to request asylum. Border Patrol agents set an all-time record in April by apprehending 58,474 members of family units. Thursday, the agency set a different record when a group of more than 1,000 migrants crossed the border together near El Paso.
That has led to crowded conditions inside and outside Border Patrol stations, detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and privately run shelters that care for migrants released from custody. Six migrant children have died in U.S. government custody in the past year.
In its response to the inspector general report, the Department of Homeland Security said it built a tent that can hold up to 500 migrants in El Paso. It will erect a similar tent there by July 31 and plans a much larger expansion "within 18 months."
The department received $450 million from Congress to improve humanitarian conditions along the southern border, and it requested an additional $1 billion to continue that work.
The inspector general described Homeland Security's response as "partially responsive" to its recommendation and urged the department to take more immediate steps to resolve the overcrowding problem.
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d6de6939d1fefb46abca1c599cdd2c32
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/01/virginia-beach-shooting-victims-remembered-songs-and-sermons/1318529001/
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Virginia Beach victims remembered with songs and sermons at vigils
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Virginia Beach victims remembered with songs and sermons at vigils
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – The shooting that killed 12 people at a municipal building here has left many seeking guidance, a need that churches rushed to meet Saturday.
At the Bridge Church in Virginia Beach, about 100 people gathered Saturday night to try to make sense of what many had described as a senseless act. As vigilgoers entered the auditorium, they saw the names of the 12 deceased on three huge screens.
“Tonight we pray for those families crushed in spirit,” said Archie Callahan, a Bridge Church pastor. “We bear their burden in prayer.”
The vigil was interspersed with sermons and prayer songs. People bowed their heads, shut their eyes, and sometimes raised their arms to the ceilings. They swayed and sang “We will rise.”
Elsewhere Saturday night, dozens of people gathered at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, where pastors from area churches encouraged community members to unite as they faced down the pain and anger that often follows this type of violence.
As the service approached its close, worshipers lit candles and stood silently, listening as the name of each victim was read aloud followed by the toll of a bell. They then raised their candles in unison while singing "Amazing Grace."
Jasmine Patterson who attended said she has spent much of her life in Virginia Beach.
"Because it's literally right here, I was very upset," she said. "I couldn't process what was happening."
But it meant a lot, she said, to attend a vigil so that she could stand in solidarity with the victims' families and honor their loved ones.
Earlier, people gathered Saturday morning outside a movie theater at a shopping complex. The setting wasn’t traditionally spiritual, but dozens of people arrived in the rain. Some even fell to their knees.
Parents showed up with their children. Many trucks bearing American flags were parked in the nearby lot. And Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam made an appearance.
Northam said to pray, not just for the victims, but also for first responders to Friday’s violence because they too are grieving.
A few people wearing clothing emblazoned with city office logos also attended the rally though they were reluctant to speak to reporters on scene.
At the Grace Covenant gathering, Maggie Connelly said she felt it was important to attend to show those whose lives had been affected that their community was stepping up to support them.
"We consider ourselves a family," she said.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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6b7048dd20692c4eba03482a682dc832
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/02/virginia-beach-shooter-dewayne-craddock-puzzles-law-enforcement/1319550001/
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Virginia Beach gunman baffles authorities; suspect was in 'good standing' in his job
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Virginia Beach gunman baffles authorities; suspect was in 'good standing' in his job
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – The longtime Virginia Beach public works employee accused of the nation's latest mass shooting put in his two-weeks notice Friday morning, hours before the attack that killed 12 and wounded four, city officials said Sunday.
Virginia Beach City Manager Dave Hansen said DeWayne Craddock's job performance was "satisfactory," he did not face any disciplinary measures before he notified the city that he intended to quit, and he was not fired.
"He was in good standing within his department, no issue of discipline ongoing," Hansen said.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Virginia Beach Police Chief Jim Cervera said the gunman’s motive is a mystery to authorities – a glaring question that may never be answered. Craddock died after the shooting.
“Right now, we’re open to everything on his motive. We haven’t focused in on any one thing,” he said. “You have a professional life, you have a personal life. Is it something that happened in his personal life? Is it something long-term that happened in his personal life?”
Cervera said investigators are looking at everything from his electronic trail and finances to his resignation and relationship with co-workers. He said nothing has stuck out that could explain why the gunman snapped.
Authorities worked to put all the pieces together and track the shooter’s exact movements Friday to see whether there were any signs, but Cervera said, “Anecdotally, what I’m hearing is it was a regular workday.”
Four shooting victims all had multiple operations and were recovering Sunday at two area hospitals. One at Sentara Virginia Beach General Hospital was downgraded from fair to critical condition after a surgery, and two others there remained in critical condition.
A fourth victim was critical but stable at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, which handles higher-level trauma cases.
Sunday, residents of this resort town about 200 miles south of Washington flocked to churches as they grappled with the horrific incident.
At Lifehouse Virginia Beach, Pastor Brandon Shank's praise for the police response received rounds of applause. He assured congregants the rampage would not define the Virginia Beach community and issued a call for unity. “What took place in this city is not who we are,” Shank said.
Craddock was described by police and those who knew him as an enigma who gave no indication that he stockpiled an arsenal and planned a systematic assault on his colleagues.
More:Virginia Beach victims remembered with songs and sermons at vigils
Craddock, a 15-year veteran of public works and a civil engineer, was still employed at the time of the rampage and had a pass to enter the secure inner offices and conference rooms.
Police arrived two minutes after emergency calls about shots fired at Virginia Beach's municipal building No. 2 at 4:08 p.m., Cervera said Sunday.
He described the three-story municipal building with a basement as a "honeycomb," a maze of doors, stairwells and offices used by city municipal workers.
In a chaotic scenario, four officers scoured the building, searching for the shooter. They discovered him on the building's second floor and engaged him in a gunbattle. The suspect fired numerous shots through an office door and wall toward the officers before the gunfire stopped, Cervera said.
That's when officers decided to enter the office and engage the shooter. "That’s not an easy decision to make," Cervera said. "There’s an individual on the other side of the door. He has a gun. He just shot one of your officers."
Police found Craddock alive but wounded and began administering first aid. The suspect died en route to the hospital.
Cervera said the shooter used a .45-caliber handgun with a silencer that police suspect was used to keep victims from knowing where the attacker was in the building.
That could explain why survivors said they were caught off guard and initially puzzled by what was happening. One described hearing something that sounded like a nail gun. The attacker brought numerous extended magazines, which carry more rounds than traditional ones.
“Clearly this was an individual who did understand and have experience with firearms and had given potentially some forethought into the advantage that using a suppressor would offer him, particularly the suppressor coupled with the caliber of weapon he was using,” said Thor Eells, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association and a retired law enforcement officer with the Colorado Springs Police Department, where he oversaw a SWAT division.
More:A 'woman of God,' a Scottish music lover: These are the victims of Virginia Beach shooting
The image of a public works employee holed up with a silencer and extended magazines engaged in a merciless assault is a far cry from how Craddock's neighbors saw him.
They described Craddock as a car enthusiast, bodybuilder and quiet man.
Amanda Archer, 22, and Cassetty Howerin, 23, lived in a Virginia Beach town home beneath Craddock for the past year and got to know him only in passing, exchanging the occasional greeting.
“He wasn’t much of a talker,” Archer recalled. “He’s a mystery to us. He’s a mystery to everybody, apparently.”
To avoid excessive publicizing of the shooter's name, officials said they would give his name publicly only once and would refer to him afterward only as "the suspect."
He served in the Army National Guard, according to a newspaper clip from the time of his city hire, and received basic military training and advanced individual training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) said he legally bought two .45-caliber handguns – in 2016 and 2018. Both were found at the crime scene, and neither was used in any other crime, the ATF reported.
Hansen said all but one of the victims were employees of the city working in the public works department. The shooter killed his first victim in a car in the parking lot before he entered the building.
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dba368329fd2fe9f0ae32ca840472e1b
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/03/college-admissions-scandal-parents-say-payments-ringleader-werent-bribes/1329466001/
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College admissions scandal: Parents say payments to ringleader weren't bribes
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College admissions scandal: Parents say payments to ringleader weren't bribes
BOSTON — Federal prosecutors say they've turned over 3 million pages of evidence to defense attorneys in their case against wealthy parents fighting charges in the nation's largest-ever college admissions scandal.
But the parents' lawyers, at a court hearing Monday, asked for access to additional reports they say detail investigators' interviews with other parents who have not been charged in the sweeping "Varsity Blues" case.
The defense said these reports – FBI documents known as a "302" – show the scheme's ringleader Rick Singer told parents not charged with crimes that their payments to his nonprofit would go to a university or a college athletics program, not to bribe anyone.
Start the day smarter:Get USA TODAY's Daily Briefing in your inbox
More:Ex-USC soccer coach reverses course, agrees to plead guilty in college admissions scandal
Federal Magistrate Page Kelley denied the defense's request to certify the documents as exculpatory evidence for now, saying she wants to see the case play out. But the exchange could preview a central defense argument of parents preparing for trial: namely, that they thought they were making charitable donations and didn't know Singer was using the money to pay off coaches and others.
Aaron Katz, an attorney for Elizabeth Henriquez, a mother from Atherton, California accused of paying bribes of $400,000 to get her two children into college, told the judge that prosecutors may have spoken to other parents who paid Singer but have not been charged.
"They told the government (that) Rick Singer told them that their money was going to go to athletic programs or schools, not to bribes," he said.
He added: "That goes to the heart of the honest services charge – a bribe and a breach in exchange for the breach of their fiduciary duty."
U.S. Assistant Attorney Eric Rosen objected to their request for the FBI documents and their argument about what constitutes a bribe. "We are not going to hand over all our 302s will-nilly because defendants have some theory about what can be exculpatory," he said.
"It doesn’t matter whether the money went to a coach’s program or the coach directly (for it to be a bribe)," Rosen said, calling the transaction a "quid pro quo."
More:Mastermind's accountant agrees to plead guilty in college admissions scandal
Attorneys for 19 defendants still fighting charges, including Katz, packed the same small courtroom for an initial status conference hearing. Many spilled into the courtroom's jury box. Extra chairs were brought in to accommodate others.
Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli – accused of paying $500,000 to Singer's nonprofit for their two daughters to be classified as crew recruits at the University of Southern California – were among those represented in court by lawyers. None of the defendants, including Loughlin, were present.
Rosen said the 3 million pages of discovery evidence turned over to the defense include 1 million pages of emails, 4,500 different wiretapped phone conversations and bank records. He said the bulk of evidence has been produced.
He said one defense attorney has asked for the massive amount of evidence to have more indexes, but added, “We’ve tried to make it as easy to streamline as possible."
The judge set the next interim status conference hearing for Oct. 2. She also said some defendants who are represented by attorneys or law firms with multiple clients in the college admissions case will have to appear in court in the coming weeks to address potential conflicts.
Later in the afternoon, nine additional defendants – college coaches and two ACT and SAT administrators who have pleaded not guilty – attended a similar status conference hearing before the same judge. Their next hearing is set for Oct. 1.
More:Felicity Huffman is just the beginning: Who's pleaded guilty in the college admissions scandal — and who's still fighting
The defendants are fighting charges even though 22 out of 50 overall defendants have either pleaded guilty or agreed to plead guilty in court at a later time. Several, including Singer, have been cooperating with the government. Actress Felicity Huffman is among those who have pleaded guilty.
Prosecutors have argued that Singer – who has pleaded guilty to four felonies –operated a vast conspiracy in which he accepted more than $25 million in donations from wealthy parents to his nonprofit, The Key Worldwide Foundation.
According to prosecutors, he sent portions of their payments to clubs or sports programs of universities that were operated by a coach who agreed to designate their children as sports recruits. To carry out the test cheating, they say Singer used donations to pay test proctors and test administrators who were in on the scheme.
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3a92212dad0119ded0ead2df50667175
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/03/nursing-homes-senate-report-facilities-poor-care/1336251001/
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Nursing home negligence: Senate report names nearly 400 facilities with 'persistent record of poor care'
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Nursing home negligence: Senate report names nearly 400 facilities with 'persistent record of poor care'
After nursing home staff allegedly failed to respond to a resident's medical concerns, he called 911 himself but died upon arrival at an Illinois hospital.
A Florida facility allegedly neglected to clean blood sugar measuring devices between testing different patients, risking infection.
The federal government puts a warning label on the first facility, but the second is one of nearly 400 nursing homes nationwide with a "persistent record of poor care" that are not publicly identified, according to a Senate report released Monday.
Pennsylvania's senators released a list of those facilities on Monday, questioning why their names are not disclosed like those in a smaller group of nursing homes where inspectors found health, safety or sanitary problems.
'Just unacceptable':Secret VA nursing home ratings hide poor quality care from the public
Among the facilities on a list the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provided is a Texas nursing home whose management allegedly failed to fix a waste system backup. Staff continued to serve food from the kitchen, the report says, despite a foul-smelling black substance coming through the drains and "seeping into the kitchen floor."
“When a family makes the hard decision to seek nursing home services for a loved one, they deserve to know if a facility under consideration suffers from systemic shortcomings,” said Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., who along with Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., issued the report
About 1.3 million Americans are nursing home residents, cared for in 15,600 facilities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The federal government in April identified about 3 percent of them as problematic in one of two categories, according to the report.
Long-term care:Cost of nursing home care makes planning ahead crucial for financial security
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services publicly discloses the names of about 80 nursing homes that investigators frequently check on to resolve documented issues. The agency calls them participants in the Special Focus Facility program.
If they don't improve, they can be cut off from Medicare and Medicaid. The government's Nursing Home Compare website identifies them with a small yellow triangle.
The 400 facilities highlighted by senators on Monday qualify for the program because of a "persistent record of poor care," but are not selected because of limited resources, according to the report. The senators describe the candidates as "nearly indistinguishable" from the smaller group.
Federal budget cuts in 2014 limited the number of nursing homes the agency can put in the oversight program, Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma said in a May letter to Senator Casey.
The agency is evaluating whether it can publicly release the list of nursing homes not in the program, Verma said.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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6132cca793289aaa577b59a0c7ca240f
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/04/carbon-dioxide-levels-hawaiis-mauna-loa-soar-record-peak/1337163001/
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Earth's carbon dioxide levels are highest they've been in millions of years
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Earth's carbon dioxide levels are highest they've been in millions of years
Carbon dioxide – the gas scientists say is most responsible for global warming – peaked again at record levels last month, scientists announced Tuesday.
Levels at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory averaged 414.8 parts per million in May, surging past yet another climate milestone. This level hasn't been seen in human history and is also higher than at any point in millions of years.
The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere increases every year, and the rate of increase is accelerating, scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced.
This is the highest seasonal peak recorded in 61 years of observations on top of Hawaii’s largest volcano, and the seventh consecutive year of steep global increases in concentrations of CO2. The 2019 peak value was 3.5 parts per million higher than the 411.3 ppm peak reached in May 2018; this is the 2nd-highest annual jump on record.
While 414 parts per million may not sound like a huge amount, scientists have known for decades that even trace amounts in the atmosphere can raise temperatures around the world.
The burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas releases greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into Earth's atmosphere and oceans. That extra carbon has caused temperatures to rise to levels over the past century and a half that cannot be explained by natural factors, scientists say.
In the past 20 years, the world's temperature has risen about two-thirds of a degree Fahrenheit, NOAA said.
“Many proposals have been made to mitigate global warming, but without a rapid decrease of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, they are pretty much futile,” said Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA’s global monitoring division.
Carbon dioxide is called a greenhouse gas for its ability to trap solar radiation and keep it confined to the atmosphere.
It is invisible, odorless and colorless, yet is responsible for 63% of the warming attributable to all greenhouse gases, according to NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.
Levels of carbon dioxide go up and down each year, reaching their highest levels in May and then going back down in the fall as plants absorb the gas.
The increase in gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide is fueling climate change and making "the planet more dangerous and inhospitable for future generations," the World Meteorological Organization said.
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ce52e6fd3db4fd046cc7bc1c3bcd6742
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/04/no-copycats-officials-deny-mass-killers-fame-avoid-their-names/1335372001/
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Denying mass killers 'sick, twisted fame': Public officials refuse to name them to avoid copycats
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Denying mass killers 'sick, twisted fame': Public officials refuse to name them to avoid copycats
If Virginia Beach authorities have their way, the gunman who killed 12 people and injured four others in Friday’s shooting rampage won’t join the ranks of infamous mass murderers in U.S. history.
To that end, they vowed his name won’t cross their lips publicly anymore.
By declining to use DeWayne Craddock’s name beyond his initial identification as the shooter, Police Chief Jim Cervera and other officials in the resort town joined a growing movement toward depriving mass killers the notoriety many of them are believed to crave.
Several studies have shown media coverage of these kinds of horrific crimes tends to incite others. In 2015, Arizona State University researchers determined that each mass shooting increased the chances of another one occurring within the next 13 days.
Opinion:Virginia Beach shooting: Cover gunmen, but don't turn them into celebrity role models
“What you often see is they’re basically saying, ‘This person was a nobody who became famous or got a lot of attention, and I want to get that same reward, even if I go about it in a somewhat different way,' " said Adam Lankford, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Alabama who has studied mass shootings.
Efforts to prevent that so-called contagion effect, also known as the copycat effect, have prompted calls for the media to de-emphasize coverage of the perpetrators, perhaps telling little about their backstories and withholding their photos. Some of the requests came from survivors of last year’s massacre in Parkland, Florida.
Cervera said in a news conference hours after the assault that the shooter “will be forever referred to as the suspect because our focus now is the dignity and respect to the victims in this case and to their families."
After a hate-fueled assault on two New Zealand mosques in March resulted in 51 deaths, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern expressly avoided mentioning the name of the attacker, an avowed white supremacist so thirsty for recognition that he livestreamed the massacre.
In May, Denver-area authorities asked reporters to focus attention on the victims of a school shooting that left one dead and eight injured, rather than the assailants.
In some instances, as in last June's killing spree at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, and after an assault in November 2017 on a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, law enforcement authorities initially refused to release the suspect's name to the media, going back on long-standing tradition.
More:A 'woman of God,' a Scottish music lover: These are the victims of Virginia Beach shooting
The advocacy group No Notoriety, founded by the parents of one of the victims of bloodshed in 2012 in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, espouses a similar approach: Downplay the name and image of the attackers, and highlight the innocent people harmed by their acts of violence.
Lankford, who called evidence of the contagion effect “indisputable," said these attempts at minimizing its impact are effective only to a point.
Yes, decreasing the amount of attention given to perpetrators may help reduce the number of copycat incidents, merely because they wouldn’t be advertised as much. But the attackers would still be more famous – or infamous – than before.
Preventing that would require more than public officials declining to refer to the suspects by name.
“That may be good," Lankford said, “but it won’t make a difference if the media saturate the coverage with that content. It only makes a difference if the media are consistent in the approach the public officials are asking for."
That’s a difficult proposition for news outlets, which see themselves as duty-bound to keep the public informed.
Nicole Dahmen, associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, said a question emerging in newsrooms across the country is how to perform that duty while minimizing harm.
Does the public interest in the identity of the assailant outweigh the impact such publicity might have on future incidents? How important is it for people to find out what the shooter looks like?
Dahmen said her research and that of her colleagues suggest changes are necessary in reporting about the aggressors in mass murders. She mentioned CNN’s Anderson Cooper and, most recently, The San Diego Union Tribune’s editorial board – but not its news department, which is separate – as early adopters of the no-name policy.
More:How cops cope with shooting trauma: 'They’re going to be forever changed,' Virginia Beach police chief says
“It’s about ethical, responsible coverage," Dahmen said. “We don’t name minor victims. We don’t name rape victims. We have changed the way we report on suicide. This is a time to revisit how we report on ‘who.’ For example, use the name once. Don’t use the name in editorial coverage. Don’t use the name in headlines. Don’t repeat the name over and over. Don’t use previous perpetrators’ names in stories about new mass shootings. The point is not to give the perpetrator the sick, twisted fame, infamy."
Part of that calls for putting more emphasis on the victims, survivors and the effect such attacks have on a community, as public officials have requested. Dahmen highlighted the need for stories that address solutions to gun violence.
Those can veer into the politically polarizing topic of gun control, but she pointed to coverage of numerous other issues related to the topic, such as school safety programs, “red flag" laws and the impact of active-shooter drills.
Like Lankford, Dahmen advocates withholding photos of mass murderers, although he goes a step further in arguing there’s not much value in making the name public, as long as the attacker has been apprehended or is dead. She favors a one-time mention of the name and not publishing any manifestos.
These suggested approaches to mass media coverage wouldn’t necessarily be followed by users of social media, but they would be a major step in limiting the amount of exposure killers may covet.
“The mass shooting problem is not journalists’ fault," Dahmen said, “but journalists do need to think about what is our role and responsibility in covering this."
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baabca92062d5893f94b1ecb6c54e21e
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/04/us-mexico-border-shooting-agents-kill-armed-man-opened-fire/1343448001/
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Border shootout: Agents shoot, kill man at California-Mexico crossing
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Border shootout: Agents shoot, kill man at California-Mexico crossing
SAN DIEGO – U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents fatally shot a motorist who refused to stop and fired at California’s border with Mexico.
The shooting took place Monday night in a secondary vehicle inspection area near the San Ysidro Port of Entry.
Police said the suspect’s vehicle was blocked, and he fired on the officers.
KNSD-TV obtained video showing gunfire as cars waited in line to get into the USA.
Border agents yelled, “Get down, everybody get down!” There were at least a dozen shots.
The officers returned fire, and the suspect was hit. Customs and Border Patrol officers and fire-rescue attempted lifesaving measures, but he did not survive.
Neighboring negotiations:US, Mexico officials to begin talks over tariffs, border
Police say the name of the 23-year-old US citizen was withheld for family notification.
None of the seven officers involved was injured.
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627dde15931c4dfd6e50dac035a3d122
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/05/limiting-climate-change-would-prevent-thousands-heat-related-deaths-us-cities/1357357001/
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Limiting climate change would prevent thousands of heat-related deaths in U.S.
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Limiting climate change would prevent thousands of heat-related deaths in U.S.
Deadly summer heat will get worse as the globe warms, so putting the brakes on climate change by reducing carbon emissions will literally be a lifesaver for thousands of Americans, a new study suggests.
In fact, researchers report that limiting global warming could drastically lower deaths in most of the 15 U.S. cities studied.
"Hundreds to thousands of heat-related deaths could be avoided per U.S. city per year during extremely hot years if the U.S. and other nations increase climate action," said study lead author Eunice Lo, a researcher at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
The study looks at temperature targets set by the Paris Climate Agreement, which seeks to limit global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. Almost 200 nations on Earth – every one except the United States – has signed on to the agreement.
The new study is the first research that looks at how different future climate scenarios, as detailed in the Paris agreement, might impact heat-related fatalities in humans.
“Climate change is not only affecting faraway places but also the United States,” said Lo. “As temperatures rise, exposure of major U.S. cities to extreme heat will increase and more heat-related deaths will occur."
The study said that limiting warming could avoid up to 2,720 annual heat-related deaths during extreme heat-events, depending on the city. New York City and Los Angeles are projected to see the most deaths associated with extreme heat as the planet warms. "This is partly because these cities are most populous and are, therefore, likely to have more people who are vulnerable to heat," Lo said.
"If we look at deaths avoided per 100,000 people," Lo added, "Miami and Detroit would have the highest numbers of heat-related deaths avoided among the 15 cities that we studied."
Limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius avoids between about 70 and 1,980 extreme heat-related deaths per city. Even more heat related deaths — between about 110 and 2,720 — can be avoided by achieving the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold.
“All heat-related deaths are potentially preventable,” said study co-author Kristie L. Ebi, a professor and researcher at the University of Washington.
The study authors also looked at Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Phoenix, Washington D.C., Atlanta, St. Louis, Boston and San Francisco.
What can be done to combat global warming?
“On a personal level, it’s important to do what we can to reduce our carbon footprint: biking, walking, and, yes, putting pressure on political figures,” Lo told the Los Angeles Times. “This administration continues to deny the science of climate change. Hold them accountable — that’s all you can do.”
The study was published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.
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2cb437aea3bab46ff278cdddd6480cb4
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/06/boston-mayor-city-cant-stop-straight-pride-parade-over-its-values/1373359001/
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Boston mayor: City can't stop 'Straight Pride' parade over values
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Boston mayor: City can't stop 'Straight Pride' parade over values
BOSTON — The City of Boston can't stop a much-debated "Straight Pride Parade" from taking place this summer just because people disagree with the organizers' cause, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said Thursday.
In a series of tweets on the heavily criticized "Straight Pride" parade, Walsh said permits to host a public event are granted based on "operational feasibility, not based on values or endorsements of beliefs."
"The City of Boston cannot deny a permit based on an organization's values," he said.
Walsh, a Democrat elected in 2013, said the organizers of the 'Straight Pride Parade" don't have a permit yet, but are "working to amend their application" for permits to host a public event. He did not say what those amendments entail.
"Whatever outside groups may try do, our values won't change," he said. "I invite each and every person to stand with us, and show that love will always prevail. Join us in celebration this Saturday for the @bostonpride Parade and in the fight for progress and equality for all."
Boston, known for its liberal politics, is considered one of the nation's LGBT-friendliest cities. Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004.
The "Straight Pride Parade" is the product of group led by three men aligned with conservative politics called "Super Happy Fun America." It's a clear dig at events traditionally organized for Pride Month, a time to celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer history.
The "Straight Pride Parade," tentatively set for Aug. 31, mirrors the route of the LGBT Pride Parade set for Saturday.
The group's president is John Hugo, a Republican candidate for Massachusetts' 5th Congressional District in 2018, who lost soundly to U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Massachusetts. Its vice president is Mark Sahady, an organizer of the right-wing group Resist Marxism.
On their website, organizers say they are "committed to creating spaces for people of all identities to embrace the vibrancy of the straight community." The group says they've adopted Brad Pitt – "a hero to straight men all around the world" – as their mascot.
Sahady has said the event is a response to the "identity politics" of the political left. "This is our chance to have a patriotic parade in Boston as we celebrate straight pride," he wrote on a Facebook Post.
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eba19fa5c6db10bba2c84022a6e3cc4d
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/06/nyc-ice-cream-trucks-towed-operation-meltdown/1365362001/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatodaycomnation-topstories
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'Operation meltdown': 46 ice cream trucks seized in New York City crackdown
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'Operation meltdown': 46 ice cream trucks seized in New York City crackdown
The New York City government began towing 46 ice cream trucks Wednesday, leaving parts of the city in a ice cream drought as it heads into the summer.
In an effort dubbed "Operation Meltdown," the city accused ice cream truck operators of breaking traffic safety laws and evading nearly $4.5 million in fines for more than a decade.
Between 2009 and 2017, the operators collected 22,000 summonses for violations, including running red lights, parking near fire hydrants and blocking pedestrian crosswalks, according to a news release sent out by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“No New Yorker is above the law – especially those who try to ignore public safety laws and create dangerous situations for pedestrians, bikers and drivers,” De Blasio said in the news release.
The city filed a lawsuit with the worst offenders, who owe more than $10,000 in judgments or unpaid fines. Thirty-four of the 46 trucks were towed on Wednesday morning and the other 12 are being sought, according to city officials.
To get away with the evasion of fines, the operators created dozens of "shell" companies, re-registering trucks under the names of different corporations, the release said.
When the city's finance department would try to collect on a debt, there would be no trace of the offending company.
"We all know from common experience that ice cream trucks are magnets for children," said city Corporation Counsel Zachary W. Carter. "In order to protect this particularly vulnerable category of pedestrians, our traffic laws must be strictly enforced."
Follow Elinor Aspegren on Twitter: @elinoraspegren
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cd5cfb698668502462610adb21b9e058
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/06/usc-hints-legal-dispute-lori-loughlin-college-scandal/1370211001/
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USC hints at lawsuit with Lori Loughlin, Mossimo Giannulli in massive college scheme
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USC hints at lawsuit with Lori Loughlin, Mossimo Giannulli in massive college scheme
BOSTON — The University of Southern California has raised the possibility of a future legal dispute with actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, designer Mossimo Giannulli, for their alleged roles in the nation's college admissions scandal, according to a letter last month from one of their lawyers.
The potential civil dispute between the university and the celebrity couple was referenced in a motion filed Thursday by prosecutors seeking a court hearing on possible conflicts of interests facing attorneys representing 11 of the 50 defendants in the sweeping college admissions case.
Among the conflicts, three law firms working for defendants in the case also represent USC, which their clients are accused of defrauding, prosecutors say.
That includes the law firm Latham and Watkins, based in Boston, which represents Loughlin and Giannulli. The couple faces mail fraud and money laundering charges for allegedly paying $500,000 in bribes to get their two daughters into the University of Southern California as crew athletes even though neither were ever crew athletes. Both have pleaded not guilty.
Attached in the court filing is a May 6 letter that one of Loughlin's and Giannulli's attorneys sent to prosecutors to address concerns about conflicts.
Attorney William Trach wrote that USC has suggested that the firm's representation of the couple "poses foreseeable conflicts because it is possible that USC may have civil disputes with one or both sometime in the future." He did not elaborate on the nature of the possible lawsuits.
A spokeswoman for USC did not comment when asked to confirm or deny whether USC is contemplating litigation against Loughlin and Giannulli.
In the prosecution's motion, filed under seal with redactions, they argue it is "directly adverse" for the three law firms to simultaneously represent USC and defendants in the college admissions case. In the event of a trial, the motion says, multiple witnesses from USC are expected to testify that the university was defrauded.
"Defense counsel will, presumably, seek to crossexamine these witnesses, who are clients of their own firms," the prosecution's motion reads. "And, if the defendants are convicted, U.S.C. will be entitled as a matter of law to restitution and to provide a victim-impact statement, either of which defense counsel will also have an obligation on behalf of their individual clients to scrutinize and potentially challenge."
More:College admissions scandal: Parents say payments to ringleader weren't bribes
The law firms have argued there is no conflict, noting that USC is not a party in the government's case and that they represent USC in matters unrelated to the cheating and bribery scheme.
In his May 6 letter, Trach said Loughlin and Giannulli have both affirmed in writing – and are prepared to state in an affidavit – that they knowingly waive any potential conflict based on the law firms' representation of USC.
"Our law firm is confident that it has no or reasonably foreseeable conflict of interest in this case," Trach wrote.
More:Lori Loughlin, husband Mossimo Giannulli plead not guilty in college admissions scam
They've proposed addressing any conflicts by having counsel handle those portions of the litigation that relate specifically to USC, such as the cross-examination of USC witnesses.
Other potential conflicts cited by the prosecution are:
A fourth set of potential conflicts of interests – listed first in the court filing – is redacted entirely.
During a court hearing Monday, federal magistrate Page Kelley indicated that she will seek to have defendants appear in court in person to address the conflicts. It's unclear when the hearings would take place.
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d0d78e2eb7306217056071368c5a3f48
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/07/lesbian-couple-london-bus-lgbt-women-kiss-performative/1382754001/
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Kiss! Kiss!: London bus attack began in a way familiar to many LGBTQ women
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Kiss! Kiss!: London bus attack began in a way familiar to many LGBTQ women
Four teenage boys were arrested Friday in an attack on two LGBTQ women on a London bus, according to a statement from London Metropolitan Police. In a Facebook post on the incident, one of the victims said she and her girlfriend were beaten after refusing to sexually perform for the group.
Melania Geymonat, who posted an account of the incident along with a photo of herself and her girlfriend Chris covered in blood, said the alleged attackers may have seen the two kissing on the upper deck of the late-night bus.
"They started behaving like hooligans, demanding that we kissed so they could enjoy watching, calling us 'lesbians' and describing sexual positions," Geymonat wrote.
The women were punched several times before the attackers ran off the bus, and a phone and bag were stolen, police said in asking for eyewitnesses.
As Pride Month kicks off around the globe, the alleged attack on Geymonat and her girlfriend shows that the privileges heterosexual couples enjoy — which include showing affection in public — are still often risky for LGBTQ people, experts say. It also shows the particular vulnerabilities of lesbian and bisexual women, who must deal with hatred directed at them not only because of their sexuality but also because of their gender.
"The women who were victims of this hate crime made it very explicit that the attack didn't just involve homophobia, it also involved misogyny," said Jane Ward, a professor of gender studies at the University of California-Riverside. "These women were already kissing — that's what drew the perpetrators attention to them. They could have quietly sat back and ogled them, but what we see here and is often the case with same-sex intimacy or touching is that it's OK when it's in the service of men, but when lesbian and bisexual women are interested in one another in ways that have nothing to do with men, that is when it becomes threatening. Those men wanted the women to turn attention from one another to them. And when they didn't it turned violent."
In November, the FBI released hate crime statistics for 2017 that showed a five percent increase in reporting of hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation bias. In 2017, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, a national organization which aims to reduce violence among LGBTQ people, recorded reports of 52 hate violence-related homicides of people who identify as LGBTQ, the highest number ever recorded by the organization.
While the majority (58%) of reported hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation target gay men, according to the FBI, lesbian, bisexual and transgender women face risks that are both similar and unique.
The lifetime prevalence of rape for lesbians is 13%, bisexual women 46% and heterosexual women 17%, according to the CDC. The lifetime prevalence of sexual violence other than rape is 46% for lesbians, 75% for bisexual women and 43% for heterosexual women. In all cases, the vast majority report male perpetrators.
Kristen Houser, chief public affairs officer at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, told USA TODAY in 2018 that myths about LGBTQ people are pervasive and contribute to violence.
"Bisexuality is seen as a curiosity, and the way it is oftentimes presented, especially in pornographic connotations, is constantly willing, like you don’t say no to anyone," Houser said. "I think you end up ... running the risk of men in particular making assumptions about not being turned down and feeling entitled."
Eliel Cruz, director of communications at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, says that consciously or unconsciously, most people who identify as LGBTQ have a safety plan in mind whenever they leave their home, and it's especially important to have one if you're planning to attend Pride events.
"We are in this month where we're celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, and in the last 50 years there has been a huge shift in legislative wins especially for marriage equality, but those wins don't always mean safety," Cruz said. "Folks zero in on homicides or when there's a really horrific attack where there's photos of blood or it's really sensationalized, but violence against LGBTQ people is an epidemic, and we really need to have conversations that emphasize this reality and what we are doing to stop it."
Cruz also encourages allies to report anti-LGBTQ violence and discrimination when they witness it and to safely intervene when possible. Some tips:
If you witness hate violence
If you witness anti-transgender bias
If you witness police violence
If you've experienced or witnessed anti-LGBTQ violence, or are concerned about someone who has, you can call the Anti-Violence Project hotline 24/7 at 212-714-1141. All calls are free and confidential. You can also report violence anonymously or ask for a counselor to reach out to you online.
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8725313d33a01b6c07e69df3d65e854e
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/08/arizona-air-conditioning-company-convinced-wwii-vet-to-sign-contract/1392102001/
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AC company convinced 103-year-old WWII vet to pay $24K, son says
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AC company convinced 103-year-old WWII vet to pay $24K, son says
Steve Klein tried to protect his 103-year-old father from exploitation as Fred Klein's memory began to decline.
Steve took over his father's bank accounts, bills and power of attorney. He took him to visit high-quality assisted-living facilities.
But Fred — a former World War II pilot who flew more than 60 bombing runs over the South Pacific and swam competitively until he was a centenarian — refused to move out of the Tucson retirement community where he lives alone, drives his own golf cart and dates a former beauty queen.
So Steve — who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona — and a troop of Fred's friends try their best to keep an eye on him instead.
Photos:Most memorable images from D-Day
Things were going well until a few months ago, Steve said, when Fred decided to spruce up his 20-year-old home.
Fred called Orangutan Home Services, a repair company he had used for more than a decade, to inspect his air conditioning. He didn't remember to consult Steve.
The day of the inspection, Fred agreed to pay more than $24,000 to buy two new units and a 10-year labor warranty.
Without access to credit cards or checks, Fred took out a 12-year loan that Orangutan offered through a financing company. If he made the minimum payments, he would pay nearly $18,000 in interest, documents show.
"I don't want to leave (Steve and his brother) a pig in a poke. I want to leave them something that's in top shape," Fred said. "But when Steve got in on the act, things changed. I found out I had been not smart about this."
Steve said that he was furious when he learned about the purchase. He believes Orangutan took advantage of his father and overcharged him.
Fred "is not competent to sign contracts anymore," Steve, 70, said. "As you can see, he can hold a conversation. He can get to the country club. He's fine in those respects. But contract-signing and critical faculties are not his strong point anymore."
June 6:World War II veteran honored for his life and service at Arlington National Cemetery
Orangutan general manager Jeff Leader said employees had no reason to believe Fred couldn't handle the purchase.
"(We've) been dealing with the person for 11 years. There's nothing posted in the house. This gentleman has made plenty of decisions in the past with nobody saying anything," Leader said. "He all of a sudden makes a bigger purchase, and they start complaining."
Balancing a parent's desire to handle their own affairs with their declining physical or mental capabilities is difficult for many children, said Marc Pulsifer, a Tempe lawyer who deals with estate planning and business contracts. There's no "bright line," he said.
"It's truly intractable because as a caregiver and a loved one, you don't want to take your father or mother's independence away. It's important to their quality of life," Pulsifer said. "And at the same time, you want to protect them."
What could the company have done?
Steve argues Orangutan should have asked Fred if he needed to call a family member.
"When you walk to the front door and there's a gentleman with a cane, who looks conservatively 90 ... I would ask them to exercise good judgment," Steve said. "The topic should come up: 'Who handles your business affairs?' That would have been a simple question."
After the visit from the repair company, Steve asked his father's doctor to assess Fred's cognitive ability.
The physician signed a letter stating tests showed Fred is "not competent to enter into business contracts on his own without the assistance of his son or other professional advice."
Feb. 21:Air Force veteran's tender song to elderly patient
Leader said Orangutan employees do ask about involving a third party if a customer clearly has memory problems, employees notice a nurse caring for a customer, or adult children have already alerted the company that they handle the finances.
But Orangutan's general manager said Fred had none of these red flags.
"The technicians are not doctors," Leader said. "How are we supposed to know? We can only judge so much."
Carol Soderquist, a Chandler family law attorney, said it's hard to prove a company should have known a customer was incapable of signing a contract.
But "a reputable company would ask," Soderquist said. "If there was any doubt whatsoever, they would make sure and confirm the person was lucid by taking notes. 'I asked the father if he understands what this provision in the contract meant. He reflected back such and such.' "
However, being elderly is not the same as being incapacitated, said Pulsifer, the Tempe lawyer.
"I can imagine a 103-year-old fellow or woman who wants to live alone and is perfectly capable of entering into the contract you described," he said.
"The next question is: Does the fellow, not just because he's old, does he appear to be incapacitated? Can he hold a conversation? If you or I were talking to him, would he appear to be cogent?" Pulsider said. "Especially if the company has a history with him and has done business with him before in good faith, if the fellow sitting in front of you appears to be cogent, I don't see a problem."
Allegations of high prices and questionable workmanship
Among the reasons Steve believes Orangutan exploited his father:
Fred paid nearly $19,700 for two high-end Trane air-conditioning units. Three companies provided lower quotes to Steve and The Arizona Republic.
Samson and Sons Heating & Cooling in Tucson gave an estimate of about $14,000 to install similar units from another brand.
June 6:VA may owe veterans millions in refunds but knowingly hasn't paid them for years, probe finds
American Home Water and Air in Phoenix quoted about $14,200 to install the same Trane units.
Family Air in Tucson said it would have charged close to $19,000 for the same units.
"That's a lot of money for what they did," Brad Steinbrecher, of American Home Water and Air, said. "This is exactly what is wrong with the industry: These commission-based companies that are gouging people."
In addition, Steve noted about half a dozen people have posted complaints on Yelp and the Better Business Bureau website accusing Orangutan of up-selling elderly relatives. And the Arizona Attorney General fined Orangutan $150,000 for making thousands of illegal telemarketing calls in 2017.
Orangutan's general manager says he did not overcharge Fred for the air-conditioning units.
"They're not overly priced. They're good units," Leader said.
Orangutan may charge more than smaller companies, but it has higher overhead because the company provides better service, he said.
"The guy out there with one or two trucks, is he going to be answering your call on the Fourth of July? He might not," Leader said. "I'm never going to be the cheapest guy on the block."
After Steve complained to the Arizona Registrar of Contractors, a state inspector found 13 areas where Orangutan's installation needed to be corrected.
The items included a gas leak, improper support and incomplete duct work, according to letters from the agency to Orangutan.
The company made repairs. At a follow-up visit, a state inspector found three items hadn't been corrected.
Orangutan's work on the air-conditioning units "fails to meet minimum workmanship standards," state regulators told the company.
"It was a completely botched installation," said Steve, who previously owned a construction company. "That's the largest areas of deficiency I've ever seen on a registrar inspection."
Many issues with Orangutan's work were minor and wouldn't have affected the air-conditioning units' performance, Leader said.
"Some of the things are kind of subjective," Leader said. "Half that list probably were things that never would have been needed to be done."
"Nobody is going to do it perfectly 100%," he added.
A settlement, and lessons learned
Even though Steve controls his father's bank accounts, he wasn't notified when Fred applied for the loan.
That's because Fred's credit line wasn't frozen. If it had been, Steve could have received a notification allowing him to approve or disapprove a credit request.
"This one I didn't see coming," he said. "I thought any transaction would be run through me. This one wasn't."
Steve hired a lawyer to negotiate a settlement.
June 6:'You're the pride of our nation,' Donald Trump tells veterans on 75th D-Day anniversary in Normandy
"Am I saying we're blameless? I'm actually not," Steve said. "We want Orangutan to get paid because the units are on the roof."
After weeks of back and forth, and a call from The Republic, the two sides agreed to drop the warranty and charge $12,000 for the units — half of the total original bill.
Orangutan will probably lose money on the deal, but after 26 years in business, the company wants the family to be happy, Leader said.
"I don't know many companies that would take half the price off," he said. "We've gone above and beyond."
Fred said he's learned to talk with his son before any large purchase.
"I used to be famous for my memory like an elephant. But age seems to have changed that. And when I listen to what I did, I hate to look stupid," Fred said. "I'm not going to do this again — that's the lesson. If I get in on any expense, Steve is in on the act."
How to freeze an elderly parent's credit
If your parent is aging and you are their guardian, conservator or have power of attorney, you can request a free credit freeze for to protect them, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Credit freezes, also known as security freezes, restrict access to the person's credit file, making it harder for identity thieves to open new accounts in their name or for a parent to open a credit line without the child knowing.
What to do:
Credit reporting agencies
Follow Rebekah L. Sanders on Twitter at @RebekahLSanders.
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806fdbce3ef1f847a2245da3333d3ef9
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/09/chris-reed-texas-police-chiefs-body-found-near-texas-city-dike/1401634001/
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Body of Texas police chief Chris Reed who fell overboard from fishing boat found near Texas City Dike
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Body of Texas police chief Chris Reed who fell overboard from fishing boat found near Texas City Dike
Searchers on Sunday found the body of a Texas police chief who toppled from a fishing boat into Galveston Bay, setting off a frantic-two day search, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
The body of Kemah Police Chief Chris Reed, who had been missing since Friday afternoon, was found at 7:54 a.m. Sunday about 1½ miles north of the Texas City Dike, according to the Coast Guard.
"It is with very heavy hearts that we share this news with you," the Kemah Police Department wrote on its website. "Please keep his family in your thoughts and prayers."
Reed, who was not wearing a life jacket, fell overboard when his boat was hit by a large wake from a passing vessel, officials said Friday. After his wife, who was also aboard the fishing boat and was not injured, called 911, the Coast Guard and dozens of local, state and federal agencies launched a search involving helicopters, rescue ships and drones.
More:A hiker texted his mom saying he was lost and needed help. A week later, he's been rescued
Reed, a retired army paratrooper, also served on the school board of Clear Creek Independent School District and formerly worked as a city manager, Houston TV station KPRC reported.
The Kemah Citizens Police Academy Alumni Association held a community support gathering Saturday night to pray for Reed's return, according to the city's Facebook page.
More:Mexican man faces federal charges in Texas crash that left 6 dead
Reed's family released a statement to KPRC on Saturday night thanking friends and local institutions for their empathy and support and lauding Reed as a beloved member of the community.
"Chris Reed is a friend to everyone, a husband, brother, a son, a mentor, a protector, chief and a coach, but within each of those roles, Chris is always a connector," the statement reads. "He connects people to create synergy and a greater good."
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1a8c7ee875823c5044e851008bebfb14
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/09/dallas-crane-collapses-apartments-death-toll-and-details/1403893001/
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Crane collapses on Dallas apartment building: 1 dead, at least 5 injured
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Crane collapses on Dallas apartment building: 1 dead, at least 5 injured
DALLAS – A construction crane buffeted by high winds during a storm toppled on a Dallas apartment building Sunday, killing one woman in the building and injuring five other people, two of them critically, a fire official said.
Crews searching the Elan City Lights building found the body of a woman inside after the crane collapsed and ripped a large gash into the side of the five-story structure, Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesman Jason Evans said during a press briefing.
“The building itself has suffered multiple collapses in different areas of the building to include residential spaces and the parking garage,” Evans said.
Of those injured, two were listed in critical condition, two suffered serious injuries and one suffered minor injuries and was later discharged from a hospital, Evans said. Earlier, he had said that six people were injured but said the figure would likely change.
First responders searched every apartment they could reach and found no other victims, Evans said. He also said that every resident of an apartment damaged by the crane was either out at the time or was among those taken to hospitals.
Crews were called to the site of the collapse just before 2 p.m., after the National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm watch for the Dallas/Fort Worth area and warned of winds up to 70 mph (113 kph). Evans said the reason the crane fell is unknown but there is a “strong possibility” that the winds “played some role in the collapse.”
Across Dallas the storm felled mature trees and knocked out power Sunday, leaving many areas without working traffic lights.
Isaiah Allen told the Dallas Morning News he was in his apartment when he heard what he thought was a deafening thunderclap. “I saw that the crane had actually fell straight through the building and had destroyed a good eight to 10 apartments and so there’s like floors and stuff falling through,” he said.
Allen told the paper he saw a bloodied woman trapped in her apartment on the second floor.
Yesenia Bosquez’s family had moved into their top-floor apartment just two weeks ago. She returned from a shopping trip to find her apartment, where she’d left her husband, Jay, to recover from a shoulder injury, crushed by the twisted metal.
It took about 30 minutes for authorities to tell her that her husband had been rescued alive and had been holding their dog while medics worked on his injuries.
“It felt like a year,” Bosquez said.
Video shows that the downed crane ripped a large hole in the east side of the building and landed on an adjacent parking garage.
The company that owned the crane, Bigge Crane and Rigging Co., said in a statement it was mobilizing personnel to the site to find out more about the crane collapse and would cooperate with any investigation.
Evans said “every single level of the parking garage in part has collapsed” and that multiple vehicles were damaged. He said he was not sure if anybody was in the garage at the time of the collapse.
Rescue personnel used dogs to try to find people who might be trapped inside the rubble.
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347677bd62aefbe1460bdb090af4db10
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/09/flooding-high-water-rescues-southeast/1401234001/
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Month of rain in a day: Parts of Southeast deal with flooding, high water rescues
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Month of rain in a day: Parts of Southeast deal with flooding, high water rescues
Roads became rivers, high-water rescues were underway, and states of emergency were being declared in parts of the Southeast on Sunday after more than a month of rain fell in a day with more on the way.
"The same storm system that linked up with tropical moisture and dumped more than a foot of rain in portions of the south-central United States is crawling eastward," AccuWeather meteorologist Renee Duff said.
Flooding that brought havoc to Oklahoma, Arkansas and other states over the past two weeks was sweeping east, threatening metro areas such as Atlanta; Nashville, Tennessee; Tallahassee, Florida; Columbia, South Carolina; and Charlotte and Raleigh in North Carolina, AccuWeather said.
Thirty miles south of Atlanta, Amy Byars said her neighborhood on Lake Peachtree appeared to have been absorbed into the lake.
"You could've ridden a boat through there," Byars told WSB-TV. "There were ducks in their yards. We got to higher ground because I wasn't going to risk my life."
The rains that rolled into the region will linger at least until Monday. Some areas could get a foot of rain, double or even triple the normal rainfall for June, AccuWeather said.
Parts of central Georgia saw 6 inches of rain in a 24-hour period that ended early Sunday, and up to 2 more inches is possible, the National Weather Service reported.
"Flooding along rivers already out of their banks could become worse," the National Weather Service warned.
Athens, home to the University of Georgia, reported 1.59 inches of rain in one hour; nearly an inch of that fell in 20 minutes. Mayor Kelly Girtz said some residents have emailed him photos of yards that have turned to ponds.
"It is always challenging when so much rain falls so quickly," he told USA TODAY. "Athens is like many towns with older areas supported by infrastructure built prior to contemporary standards, so the volume of water we have experienced has overwhelmed some neighborhoods."
The weather forced some vendors to fold their tents at the city's iconic Hot Corner Celebration and Soul Food Fest, which draws thousands to the historic African American business district. Musical acts were driven indoors at Saturday's fest.
More:Louisiana: One dead amid flooding, heavy rains and reported tornadoes
More:Earthquake, flood, hurricane: Google Maps adds tools to help you navigate
“I’m sure they’re kind of bummed about it, not having the stage," Montu Miller, stage manager of secular music for the festival, told the Athens Banner-Herald. "There’s a lot of things we can control, but the weather’s not one of them.”
In North Carolina, Catawba County declared a state of emergency Sunday, citing heavy rain that began Friday and is expected to continue for several more days.
"The excessive rainfall has resulted in numerous water rescues, severe flooding, infrastructure damage, hazardous travel conditions and the potential for widespread power outages," the county warned.
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76cac29851a67a4967e81309073c2b4a
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/10/california-health-care-immigrants-insurance/1406629001/?utm_source=wnd&utm_medium=wnd&utm_campaign=syndicated
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California to become the first state to extend health benefits to some who live in USA illegally
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California to become the first state to extend health benefits to some who live in USA illegally
California was poised Monday to become the first state to provide health care coverage to young, low-income adults living in the country illegally after legislative leaders provided a thumbs-up to Gov. Gavin Newsom's $98 million plan targeting almost 100,000 low-income adults.
The full Legislature still must sign off on the plan that would make such immigrants ages 19 to 25 eligible for Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program. The deal was a win for Newsom, who rejected as too expensive a state Senate plan to include adults 65 and older living in the state illegally.
The California Immigrant Policy Center called the program a "clear step forward" but lamented the decision to block the elderly from the plan.
"The exclusion of undocumented elders from the same health care their U.S. citizen neighbors are eligible for means beloved community members will suffer and die from treatable conditions," the advocacy group said in a statement.
Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Health Access, said further expansion of the program could come in the future.
"We will continue to pursue steps towards the Governor’s & Legislature’s shared goal of getting to universal coverage in the next few years," Wright posted on Twitter.
The deal, which will become effective in January is part of a larger effort to ensure everyone in the state has access to health insurance. Lawmakers have until Saturday to approve the budget or face losing their pay.
The proposal also makes California the first state to subsidize insurance for middle-income families. A family of four earning as much as six times the federal poverty level – or more than $150,000 a year – would be eligible for $100 a month from the government to help pay for insurance. Newsom had initially balked at the subsidy but ultimately relented.
“California believes that health is a fundamental right,” said state Sen. Holly Mitchell, a Los Angeles Democrat who led the budget negotiations.
But to pay for part of it, the state will begin taxing people who don’t have health insurance. The plan is similar to a part of President Barack Obama’s health care law that Republicans in Congress eliminated as part of the 2017 overhaul to the tax code.
Not that the state is desperate for cash: California is projected to have a surplus of more than $20 billion, the largest in 20 years.
Some Republicans on the legislative committee negotiating the budget voted against the health care proposal, noting that some Californians living in the U.S. legally have no access to health care.
Andrew Clark, who a week ago began work as director of rapid response for the Trump 2020 campaign, was quick to complain on Twitter.
"California Democrats' new $100 million plan in the works will start providing health care to illegal immigrants ... and pay for it by taxing people (legal residents!) who don't have health insurance," Clark tweeted.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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90701aa741845039e202af9667a0f5c8
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/11/zombie-snakes-eastern-hognose-snake-goes-viral-but-harmless/1417209001/
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'Zombie snakes' are going viral. They aren't particularly dangerous, but they are 'kind of adorable'
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'Zombie snakes' are going viral. They aren't particularly dangerous, but they are 'kind of adorable'
No, these snakes aren't zombies.
Everyone knows the opossum plays dead, but news stories of "zombie snakes" began circulating this week after park officials in North Carolina posted photos on Facebook of a snake that exhibits similar behavior.
"Who is this 'famous' NC snake? A cobra? A zombie snake?" North Carolina State Parks and Recreation wrote in a Facebook post Thursday.
The answer: an eastern hognose, or Heterodon platirhinos.
But the snakes are mostly harmless to humans, says Katie Hall, a spokeswoman for North Carolina State Parks and Recreation.
"We love hognose snakes," Hall told USA TODAY on Tuesday. "They put on this really dramatic display, but it's kind of adorable."
Known for rolling on its backs and opening its mouth, the eastern hognose snake often plays dead to prevent predators from attacking.
The snakes are also known as the "puff adder" and "blowing viper." When threatened they often hiss and inflate their necks, like a cobra, according to the Virginia Herpetological Society.
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Killer cows?! They don't look as scary as a snake or a bear, but these animals are surprisingly deadly
The snakes may strike after the hissing, but they almost never actually bite, Hall said.
"If this does not deter the predator and if the snake is touched, it will writhe as if in pain and agony, turn over repeatedly, open the mouth, extrude the tongue, and evert the cloaca," or the end of its digestive tract, writes the Virginia Herpetological Society.
The snake then goes limp and lies on its back. After a few minutes, it will check to see if the predator is gone.
"All of these flashy things are really just to hide that they're mostly harmless," Hall said.
Lizard gives birth without breeding:Without the help of any male, this female lizard became pregnant alone and successfully gave birth
In their Facebook post, North Carolina park officials also calked the snake "a harmless one." The post was promoting the park division's Year of the Snake program that aims to "scale back your fear" about snakes, Hall said.
Hall said "zombie" wasn't the best choice of word to include in the post. The park division wanted to "reduce people's fear about snakes because they're really important in our ecosystem," she added.
Yet some news outlets still incorrectly wrote that the state park and recreations department was "warning" about the snake. And some social media users thought the portrayals of the snake was exaggerated, too.
Hognoses are common in the southeastern United States, Hall said. They are also rear-fanged, meaning they don't have large front fangs, and their venom is not significant. Hall compared them to garter snakes, which also have small amounts of venom but aren't harmful to humans.
According to the Florida Museum's Division of Herpetology, there are no known recorded deaths from the snake.
45 rattlesnakes:A Texas homeowner saw a 'few' rattlesnakes and called for help. The removal company found 45 of them
"Another old myth says that the Hognose Snake can mix venom with its breath and is thus able to kill a person from a distance of twenty-five feet," the museum's website states. "In truth, its breath is harmless."
Hall added: "If you see any snake, calmly walk away and leave it alone."
Follow USA TODAY's Ryan Miller on Twitter @RyanW_Miller
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0d80541680729f65a9ac567895c98ff4
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/12/cannabis-first-used-2-500-years-ago-china/1431552001/
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'Stoned-age?' People smoked weed 2,500 years ago, earliest use yet discovered
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'Stoned-age?' People smoked weed 2,500 years ago, earliest use yet discovered
Some 2,500 years ago, in present-day China, people were using cannabis to get high during rituals, scientists announced in a new study published Wednesday.
This is the first known use of weed by humans anywhere in the world, the study suggests.
"Modern perspectives on cannabis vary tremendously cross-culturally, but it is clear that the plant has a long history of human use, medicinally, ritually, and recreationally, over countless millennia," said study author Robert Spengler, an archaeobotanist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
The pot was likely smoked during burial ceremonies, perhaps as a way to communicate with the divine or the dead, the authors say.
“It’s the earliest strong evidence of people getting high” on marijuana, said Mark Merlin, a botanist at the University of Hawaii, who was not involved in the research.
Residue of the drug was discovered on ancient pots in tombs in the Pamir mountains, a region near the borders of modern China, Pakistan and Tajikistan, archaeologists said.
Using new techniques for chemical analysis, researchers examined the residue and found evidence of THC, the compound that gives pot its high. Most wild cannabis plants have low levels of THC, so scientists think the people who built the graves deliberately selected or cultivated plants with higher amounts.
The cannabis plants produced high levels of psychoactive compounds, which indicates that people were aware of and interacting with specific populations of the plant, said study co-author Nicole Boivin, also of the Max Planck Institute.
"The findings support the idea that cannabis plants were first used for their psychoactive compounds in the mountainous regions of eastern central Asia, thereafter spreading to other regions of the world," Boivin said.
Though remote today, the location in western China where the tomb was discovered may once have sat near a key ancient trade route of the early Silk Road. The Silk Road was at one time the single most important route for cultural spread in the ancient world, according to the study.
This allowed the drug to spread around the world.
"The exchange routes of the early Silk Road functioned more like the spokes of a wagon wheel than a long-distance road, placing Central Asia at the heart of the ancient world," Spengler said.
"Our study implies that knowledge of cannabis smoking and specific high-chemical-producing varieties of the cannabis plant were among the cultural traditions that spread along these exchange routes," he added.
The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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60bee075e48ccb392e6a3f2f3156cbcc
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/12/knox-county-detective-lgbtq-execution-grayson-fritts/1433604001/
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Tennessee detective's church sermon calls for execution of LGBTQ people
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Tennessee detective's church sermon calls for execution of LGBTQ people
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – The Knox County Attorney General's Office said it is reviewing cases involving a Knox County Sheriff's detective who in a June sermon called for the government to arrest and execute LGBTQ community members.
In an hourlong video of the sermon online, Detective Grayson Fritts, also a pastor at All Scripture Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, tells his congregation that he believes federal, state and county governments should arrest, convict and "speedily" execute LGBTQ people on no more grounds than a cellphone photo showing participation in a Pride event.
Attorney General Charme Allen said she will also assign an assistant district attorney to take complaints about any past cases involving the detective.
“I find this speech personally offensive and reprehensible. As District Attorney, my constitutional obligation is to protect the integrity of the justice system," Allen said in a statement late Wednesday.
Fritts has taken a buyout and is on paid sick leave until the buyout goes into effect in July.
Fritts delivered his sermon June 2 at the church near downtown Knoxville on the first Sunday of Pride Month, which honors the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, considered a galvanizing moment in the gay rights movement.
More:Southern Baptists move to expel churches not addressing sexual abuse
More:Catholic Church rejects transgender identity as a 'trend'
All Scripture Baptist Church describes itself as an "independent, fundamental, King James Bible only, soul-winning church," on its website. "Don’t expect anything liberal, watered down, or contemporary here," it goes on to say.
Tennessee Equality Project executive director Chris Sanders called the use of religion and a law enforcement position to attack LGBTQ people "particularly reprehensible."
"The symbolism is extremely palpable considering it is Pride Month and the anniversary of the Orlando pulse shooting," Sanders said.
"We hope that there is a thorough quick investigation of this Knox County employee, and if all the facts are confirmed, he should not be in law enforcement."
Fritts screams into the microphone, advocates for police riot teams to haul off Pride participants en masse and uses multiple slurs against the LGBTQ community.
He also targets Christians and others who support the LGBTQ community.
Fritts references his law enforcement career multiple times during the sermon, first telling the congregation "such arrests and executions should be carried out by our government, not Christians," pausing for laughter as he adds, "unless you're a policeman."
Fritts has worked for the Knox County Sheriff's Office since 1999 and was named a detective of the month in 2017.
Follow Brittany Crocker on Twitter: @brittcrocker.
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07051adad4e1eeadcec14e612691a6b4
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/13/lgbtq-sermon-tennessee-detective-cases-review/1444319001/
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Tennessee detective responds after backlash for hate-filled sermon
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Tennessee detective responds after backlash for hate-filled sermon
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – A Tennessee district attorney general said prosecutors will review all pending cases involving a detective who delivered a hate-laced sermon calling for the execution of LGBTQ people at a church here earlier this month.
Knox County District Attorney General Charme Allen also said she will assign an assistant district attorney to take complaints about any past cases involving the former detective, Grayson Fritts, a 30-year veteran of the Knox County Sheriff's Office. Fritts was put on sick leave earlier in June.
“I find this speech personally offensive and reprehensible. As District Attorney, my constitutional obligation is to protect the integrity of the justice system," Allen said in a statement late Wednesday.
June 12:Tennessee detective's church sermon calls for execution of LGBTQ people
"When any potential witness in a criminal proceeding expresses an opinion of hatred and/or bias towards a class of citizens, I am ethically bound to explore that witness’ credibility," Allen said. "Accordingly, I am reviewing all pending cases involving Mr. Fritts to scrutinize them for any potential bias.
"Although my office has never received a complaint regarding Mr. Fritts prior to this incident, I have assigned an Assistant District Attorney to receive complaints regarding closed cases, and I will act on those complaints as justice dictates.”
The sheriff's office also shared Fritts' personnel record, which showed only two minor reprimands. Fritts also was involved in two shootings.
In the hourlong sermon based on an Old Testament passage, Fritts, also a pastor at All Scripture Baptist Church in Knoxville, told his congregation June 2 that he believes that federal, state and county governments should arrest, try, convict and "speedily" execute people within the LGBTQ community on no more grounds than a cellphone photo of a person participating in a Pride event.
The sermon was delivered on the first Sunday of Pride Month, which honors the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, considered a galvanizing moment in the gay rights movement.
Fritts defended his comments in his sermon Wednesday, saying that he is not alone in his beliefs, but said he’s the only one willing to take a stand for it.
“I’m not an anomaly. I am a Baptist preacher that is just preaching the Bible and if it offends society, then it’s going to offend society, but if all these other pastors would grow a spine … and would stand up just like I’m standing up. …”
Sheriff Tom Spangler issued a statement Wednesday afternoon that Fritts had asked two weeks ago to take a county buyout offer. Spangler said he agreed, and Fritts is on paid sick leave until it takes effect July 19.
Fritts said the buyout was not related to his sermons.
"I want to be very clear that it is my responsibility to ensure equal protection to ALL citizens of Knox County, Tennessee under the law, my oath and the United States Constitution without discrimination or hesitation," Spangler said. "Rest assured that I have and will continue to do so."
Chris Sanders, executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project, said it is "particularly reprehensible when people use religion and their position in law enforcement to attack our community," Sanders said.
"This is why we celebrate pride," said Sterling Field, Tennessee Equality Project chairman for Knox, Blount and Anderson counties. "We’ve had police brutality in the past. Pride started with the Stonewall uprising 50 years ago as a group of folks trying to assert that they deserve to be alive and deserve to have dignity and respect."
Field pointed out violence against the LGBTQ community is real, including the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando that cost 49 people their lives and a shooting in 2008 at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church that killed two people.
More:Remembering the 49: 3 years after Pulse massacre
Knox Pride President Jennifer Green said the organization has not previously encountered any issues with the sheriff's office, and works with the Knoxville Police Department and the city on security for the event.
All Scripture Baptist Church describes itself as an "independent, fundamental, King James Bible only, soul-winning church," on its website. "Don’t expect anything liberal, watered down, or contemporary here," it goes on to say.
At points during a video of the sermon, Fritts screams into the microphone, advocates for police riot teams to haul off Pride participants en masse and uses multiple slurs against the LGBTQ community.
He also targeted Christians and others who support the LGBTQ community.
Fritts has worked for the Knox County government since 1999 and was named a detective of the month in 2017.
Follow Brittany Crocker and Tyler Whetstone on Twitter: @BrittCrocker and @tyler_whetstone.
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3dfb02e16648ed5945c6f5fe0a6485f1
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/13/stanford-sailing-coach-spared-prison-others/1442496001/
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Analysis: Those in college scandal could still go to prison, despite first defendant skating
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Analysis: Those in college scandal could still go to prison, despite first defendant skating
BOSTON — The Justice Department wanted to "set the tone" with a strong first sentence in the nation's college admissions scandal. Instead, former Stanford sailing coach John Vandemoer was spared prison altogether Wednesday.
It was a clear win for Vandemoer and his defense team – two years of supervised release, including the first six months confined to his home, and a small $10,000 fine. Most importantly, he got just one day of prison, deemed already served, after pleading guilty to racketeering charges in March.
For prosecutors, who had sought 13 months of prison, the outcome was a setback.
But should other defendants – parents, coaches and other co-conspirators – who have pleaded guilty to either paying or accepting bribes now expect the same?
More:Former Stanford sailing coach avoids prison in first sentence of college admissions scandal
While some legal experts say it's a positive sign for other people charged in the scandal, most contend the Vandemoer case isn't a great barometer to preview how their cases will turn out. Vandemoer's actions were unique among all 50 defendants in the entire "Varsity Blues" scandal:
U.S. District Judge Rya Zobel, prior to handing down the sentence, called Vandemoer "probably the least culpable of all the defendants." She said he was no doubt a participant but painted Singer as the real instigator. "Mr. Singer pushed, and he really pushed," the judge said, and "Mr. Vandemoer responded by saying, 'yes, yes.'"
“That certainly has something to say about what the sentence should be," Zobel said, later calling the actions "serious crimes" but not enough to warrant prison.
The snap reaction from some legal observers was to frame the sentence as not just a victory for Vandemoer, but perhaps other defendants.
"This is a good sign for all of the parents," said criminal defense attorney Lara Yeretsian, who is not representing any defendant in the varsity blues case but who has worked for other celebrities. She said the Vandemoer outcome should bolster the case of actress Lori Loughlin, for example, who has been charged for paying Singer bribes totaling $500,000 to get her two daughters classified as crew recruits to get them into the University of Southern California.
"The coach, who was charged with racketeering, accepted a lot more money than Lori Loughlin or other parents paid, and the judge said that he shouldn't serve jail time," Yeretsian said. "The parents lost money by doing this, and the fact that the judge granted leniency for the coach means that Loughlin and other parents may not end up serving time."
More:Lori Loughlin digs in – and 7 more surprises and takeaways in college admissions scandal
But unlike Vandemoer's case, the prosecution can argue Loughlin's payments took away two admissions slots at USC from more qualified students. Loughlin has pleaded not guilty to mail fraud and money laundering charges, while the case's other celebrity defendant, actress Felicity Huffman, has pleaded guilty to paying $15,000 to Singer to have someone correct answer's on her daughter's SAT exam.
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who specializes in federal courts, said other defendants shouldn't breathe a sigh of relief as a result of Vandemoer's sentence.
"I think they'll be taken on their own facts and the arguments they make," he said. "I don't know that it tells us a whole lot about any other cases that are coming up, really.
"It seems like there were some factors that led the judge to appear more lenient than certainly the U.S. attorney wanted in their arguments, but I think the key is each case to some extent is unique on its facts, and the judges hopefully will sentence and accord with that."
Even Vandemoer's defense team, who said keeping him out of prison was their goal, stopped short of declaring the government's larger case in trouble.
"John is a unique defendant in a unique case," said his attorney Robert Fisher, who previously worked as a prosecutor for the U.S. District of Massachusetts. "It's a case that surprised the country, and he's a unique part of that because he's the only one who did not take funds or get a student into school. He added: "I wouldn't say it's a blow to the prosecution."
At the sentencing hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Rosen argued that Vandemoer's sentence should set an example in the historic case and that a prison term would "send a powerful message" to those who abuse the admissions system and hard-working high school students who follow the rules.
Prosecutors have recommended varying lengths of prison time for each of the 21 other defendants in the college admissions case who have either pleaded guilty or agreed to later.
More:Felicity Huffman is just the beginning: Who's pleaded guilty in the college admissions scandal — and who's still fighting
In a brief statement after the disappointing result for the prosecution, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said, “We will continue to seek meaningful penalties in these cases.”
Rosen struggled to make the case that Stanford suffered any loss as a result of Vandemoer's actions and that Vandemoer gained anything from the transaction. But it might be an easier argument for the government in cases where coaches kept the money and fabricated recruits made it on collegiate sports rosters.
Rosen cited Vandemoer's salary paid by Stanford as a loss for the school. And he said directing the money to the sailing program was "absolutely his gain" because he could buy boats and other sailing equipment that benefit him as a coach.
The judge shot back: “So it’s a psychological gain.”
Rosen, clearly frustrated, responded: “It’s not a psychological gain. He had the choice to put (the money) where he wanted.”
Perhaps more troubling for the prosecution's larger argument was another line of question from the judge.
The government has prosecuted coaches and other co-conspirators of Singer under the Racketeer and Influenced and Corrupt Organized Act, typically used to prosecute organized crime. But the judge said that while Vandemoer certainly committed fraud against Stanford, she wasn't convinced he paid bribes, which is considered racketeering activity under the act.
“You call them a bribe, but it’s not clear to me what makes it a bribe," Zobel said.
Rosen disagreed again: “A bribe is simply a quid pro quo. He wanted the money for the sailing program, and he went about it in a criminal way that goes against Stanford’s ethical standards.”
At times in the hearing, both Zobel and the defense accused prosecutors of trying to set a precedent with the Vandemoer case to help cases down the road.
“This isn’t about him," Fisher said. "It’s about the cases that come after him.”
"I don’t know what you’re fighting for other than your other cases," Zobel told Rosen during a back and forth on a technical question about which sentence guidelines to apply.
Zobel, a federal judge for 40 years, has been assigned to only one other defendant in the case – Singer, whose sentencing hearing is scheduled for Sept. 19.
Tobias, the law professor, said some of issues raised by her could "open up some avenues for defense counsel in subsequent cases: what to be prepared for, what they government's argument might look like. It does give them a bit of a window, I would expect."
And because Zobel is well-respected in federal court, Tobias said other judges could be persuaded to take a similar action if a similar case emerges. But he cautioned, "Nothing she did would bind them in any way."
"Her general approach they may follow, but the facts and the law may lead somewhere else."
Reach Joey Garrison on Twitter @joeygarrison.
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db88347ad30473cad300d6f3d5c162b3
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/13/waskom-texas-declared-sanctuary-city-unborn-bans-abortion/1443699001/
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'Sanctuary city for the unborn': All-male city council in Texas town bans most abortions
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'Sanctuary city for the unborn': All-male city council in Texas town bans most abortions
A small town in Texas has declared itself the state's first "sanctuary city for the unborn" after its city council, made up solely of men, passed a resolution banning most abortion procedures.
Waskom, Texas, has no abortion services available, but supporters of the ordinance wanted a measure to prevent an abortion clinic from being able to open in the city of roughly 2,000, KTAL-TV reported.
A packed crowd was reportedly in attendance at the city council meeting Tuesday night when all five men voted for the measure, which declares abortion providers "criminal organizations."
Its passage comes amid a larger push around the country, mostly in statehouses, to pass laws that restrict women's access to abortion in hopes that one of the laws will be challenged and make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Supporters then hope that justices will reconsider the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which protects women's right to an abortion.
Abortion poll:Most Americans oppose 'fetal heartbeat' laws, closing of all clinics in a state
According to KETK-TV, the Waskom measure calls Roe v. Wade and laws that permit abortion "unconstitutional usurpations of judicial power ... and are null and void in the City of Waskom.”
Before the vote, Mayor Jesse Moore told the city council and residents that the town probably would face a lawsuit for the ordinance but that it couldn't afford to lose the challenge.
Moore said he hoped the Supreme Court would use a legal challenge to the declaration to look at Roe v. Wade again. However, it's not clear whether the nation's highest court will take on any case that could potentially reverse the Roe decision. Abortion-rights groups have already filed challenges to recent laws in states such as Alabama and Ohio.
Still, backers of the measure celebrated its passage in Waskom.
"We decided to take things into our own hands and that we have got to do something to protect our cities and to protect the unborn children," Mark Lee Dickson, director of East Texas Right to Life, said, according to KETK-TV.
Interactive map:Where is abortion legal? Everywhere. But ...
The measure, which exempts victims of rape and incest and women whose lives are at risk without an abortion, comes after neighboring Louisiana recently passed a law banning abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected.
Waskom is just a short drive from Shreveport, Louisiana, and Moore said that he feared a Louisiana abortion clinic may want to move to Waskom after the law passed, the Longview (Texas) News-Journal reported.
Follow USA TODAY's Ryan Miller on Twitter @RyanW_Miller
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ab80bfe355bc937452f5e8c82e22e16b
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/14/3rd-grader-pays-school-lunch-debt-classmates-his-allowance/1444169001/
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'One heck of a noble kid': 3rd grader uses allowance to pay classmates' school lunch debt
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'One heck of a noble kid': 3rd grader uses allowance to pay classmates' school lunch debt
A 9-year-old California boy used money which he had been saving from his allowance since Christmas to pay for his classmates’ school lunch debts for the entire third grade class, sparking widespread praise on social media.
Ryan Kyote would normally have spent his money on baseball cards or new ballet slippers, his mother Kylie Kirkpatrick told USA TODAY on Thursday.
But one morning while eating breakfast he heard on the news that a little girl in Indiana was forced to return her hot lunch after learning she didn't have enough money in her student account.
Kirkpatrick remembers Ryan asking “How can a five-year-old owe a school money?”
She called West Park Elementary School in Napa, California to find out the district’s policies on school lunches. Although the school doesn’t turn away students who can’t pay for school lunches, Kirkpatrick discovered students can accrue debt that is then billed to their parents at the end of the year.
No jelly sandwiches:After backlash, school district changes decision to give kids with lunch debt jelly sandwiches
Another example of generosity:Chobani pays off student lunch debt for an Idaho school district
“As a single parent I’m pretty strict on finances,” she said. “If I was to receive a bill of $100 at the end of the year that would be hard for us.”
She relayed the information to Ryan after he got home from school, along with the fact that his own classmates in the third grade owed $74.50 in lunch debts. That’s when he decided he wanted to use his allowance to pay for his friends.
The selfless gesture has received attention from celebrities and politicians alike, including presidential Democratic hopefuls Senator Bernie Sanders and Mayor Bill de Blasio, who used the episode as a chance to discuss issues of poverty in America.
They also praised Ryan's actions, with de Blasio calling him "One heck of a noble kid."
Napa Valley Unified School District confirmed that West Park Elementary School received Ryan's donation to the third grade class and appreciates his support to the lunch program.
"The district is grateful for his compassion and he should be proud of his act of kindness," NUVSD spokesperson Stacy Rollo told USA TODAY on Friday. "It shines a light on a broader issue."
Ryan’s mom says he’s touched by all the attention and looks up to other donors eliminating lunch debt for other schools, such as Chobani’s $85,000 contribution to a school district in Idaho.
“As a parent I’m impressed of how much something could come from a small gesture and I’m really so proud of him,” Kirkpatrick said.
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156fa2ef7b6cc1afc23443ec15112652
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/16/california-could-limit-how-police-use-facial-recognition-technology/1456448001/
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California could become first to limit facial recognition technology; police aren't happy
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California could become first to limit facial recognition technology; police aren't happy
SAN FRANCISCO – A routine traffic stop goes dangerously awry when a police officer’s body camera uses its built-in facial recognition software to misidentify a motorist as a convicted felon.
Guns are drawn. Nerves fray. At best, lawsuits are launched. At worst, tragedy strikes.
That imaginary scenario is what some California lawmakers are trying to avoid by supporting Assembly Bill 1215, the Body Camera Accountability Act, which would ban the use of facial recognition software in police body cams – a national first if it passes a Senate vote this summer and is signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
State law enforcement officials here do not now employ the technology to scan those in the line of sight of officers. But some police officials oppose the bill on the grounds that a valuable tool could be lost.
The tug of war over high-tech surveillance methods comes in the wake of this tech hub’s City Council banning all forms of facial recognition software last month. Oakland and Berkeley council members are considering similar bans.
California’s AB 1215 reflects growing concerns nationwide about the darker side of tech – when the same software that allows iPhone X users to unlock their devices with a glance could wrongfully finger you as a criminal or keep tabs on you for Big Brother.
“There’s been an increased focus on privacy issues generally by state legislatures this year,” says Pam Greenberg of the National Council of State Legislatures.
Lawmakers in Massachusetts, New York and Washington are considering bills that scrutinize and curtail the use of biometric and facial recognition systems on grounds that the still flawed technology presents an Orwellian threat to civil liberties.
New York debates biometrics:Public school district in New York starts using facial recognition to stop mass shootings
Congress also is weighing in. After hearings on the technology on May 22 and June 4, a bipartisan U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee unanimously agreed to push for a nationwide facial recognition ban while more legal and regulatory guidance was sought.
“Even if this tech were to one day work flawlessly, do we want to live in a society where the government knows who you are, where you’re going, the expression on your face?” says Matt Cagle, tech and civil liberties attorney with the ACLU of Northern California.
“Consider also that the history of surveillance is one of it being turned against the most vulnerable communities,” Cagle adds.
San Francisco City Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who was instrumental in the city’s ban, says no possible benefit of facial recognition systems “outweighs its demonstrable harms, and the fact that we have seen this spread to other cities and to congressional hearings so rapidly is evidence of the emerging consensus around that fact.”
'Rolling surveillance cameras'
Assembly member Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), sponsor of AB 1215, sees fundamental freedoms being encroached if police use facial recognition tech.
“If you turn on facial recognition, you have rolling surveillance cameras,” he says. “And I don’t think anyone in America wants to be watched 24/7.”
What’s more, AB 1215 supporters say facial recognition would undermine the very reason body cams were introduced in the wake of police shootings, which is to build trust with community members through accountability.
“Adding facial recognition is a perversion of the purpose of body cams,” says Harlan Yu, executive director of Upturn, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group promoting justice in technology. “And it doesn’t help that this software often has a harder time differentiating faces when it comes to people of color.”
While acknowledging that the tech is still in its infancy, some police officials say a wholesale ban is premature.
“Facial recognition could be a valuable tool for us, helping identify felons or even abducted children,” says Detective Lou Turriaga, director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents 10,000 officers.
“I understand trying to seek a balance between civil liberties and law enforcement, but a wholesale ban doesn’t help us protect anybody,” he says. “Why remove that tool from law enforcement? It just doesn’t make sense.”
Amazon says no to police on scan tech:Amazon shareholders reject banning sale of facial recognition software to law enforcement
Also opposed to AB 1215 as written is the California Police Chiefs Association, although the organization declined to specify why.
Two police department have made waves recently by testing facial recognition software in limited ways.
In Florida, the Orlando Police Department remains in a “test phase” of Amazon’s Rekognition software, and the technology is “not being used for investigative or public purpose, says Sgt. Eduardo Bernal, the department’s public information officer.
And in Washington County, Oregon, the sheriff’s department uses its facial recognition software to compare photos of people suspected of crimes with a database of jail booking photos. The department does not use the tech for live or mass surveillance.
“We are beyond the piloting phase, but continue to make sure we’re using the technology as responsibly as possible, and we’ve made small tweaks to our practices over time,” says public information officer Deputy Brian van Kleef of the Washington County Sheriff's Office.
Careful use of facial recognition is admirable, but it doesn’t prevent such accumulated data from being hacked by a third party, says the ACLU’s Cagle.
“With just a few lines of code and a connection to those cameras, you could potentially turn all that against the community,” he says.
'Not ready for prime time'
Of greater concern to some privacy watchdogs is what Assemblymember Ting calls the “not ready for prime time” nature of facial recognition tech.
While an iPhone X’s camera works well repeatedly scanning the same face for the same topographical features in order to unlock the smartphone, that’s different from asking the technology to match a real face with a two-dimensional photo.
Last year, the ACLU conducted an experiment in which it used Rekognition software to compare photos of current members of Congress with 25,000 mugshots. The result was that 28 congressional members were falsely flagged as criminals.
There are a growing number of examples that both laud and damn facial recognition software.
On the one hand, Google Photos once labeled two African-Americans as “gorillas.”On the other, law enforcement used the tech last year to identify the perpetrator in the shooting deaths of five at the Capital Gazette in Maryland, and in India, about 3,000 missing children were identified in four days using the software.
iPhone maker ups privacy concerns:Apple targets privacy in upcoming iOS
If there is one cautionary tale that surfaces repeatedly in discussions of this technology, it is the case of China’s zealous policing through an array of cameras equipped with facial recognition software of the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority in the western part of the country.
“This all is a lot bigger than police body cams, it’s cameras in buildings and on streets, in drones, we’re reaching a critical mass now and haven’t been paying attention,” says Brian Hofer, chairman of the City of Oakland’s privacy commission, which is pushing council members to adopt a ban.
“There’s something visceral about facial recognition, something creepy,” he says. “We have seen the horrors of using the system to target a population, as in China, and yet we have this ridiculous belief surveillance will be used in a friendly manner.”
Problems with accuracy
Many privacy advocates note that Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, recently cast doubt on the state of facial recognition tech, which his company develops.
The Redmond, Washington, company declined to sell its tech to an unnamed California police agency, which wanted to use it to scan faces via cameras in cars and on officers.
“We said this technology is not your answer,” Smith said at a Stanford conference in Northern California on artificial intelligence in April, noting that the software largely was trained on mostly white and male photos.
Researcher Joy Buolamwini of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology echoed as much after her experiments earlier this year showed that the technology had particular difficulties accurately identifying women of color.
And last summer, Rick Smith, CEO of body camera manufacturer Axon, said he wasn’t ready to make the tech available for body cameras because the “accuracy thresholds” aren’t where they need to be.
Such concerns from technologists themselves give many privacy advocates pause, warning that if actions aren’t taken by lawmakers on a city, state or national level soon, it could be too late.
Which is why tackling the issue now is crucial, says Robin Feldman, director of the Institute for Innovation Law at University of California-Hastings College of the Law.
“Police body cams touch on information integrity in two ways,” she says. “One, if I use the tech, can I trust the information I am getting? And two, when the tech uses my information, can I trust what happens to it? And in both cases here, it’s problematic.”
Feldman says humans always have a tendency to romanticize the benevolent and magical powers of technology, at our own peril.
“The great computer in the sky is not foolproof,” she says. “I don’t think it’s possible to put the tech genie back in the bottle. Which is why when it comes to facial recognition software, we need sound policies right now over how it is used.”
Follow USA TODAY national correspondent @marcodellacava
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7fa458572dc3ad91c06f633dbdba5ec0
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/16/dolphins-stranded-more-than-260-dolphins-stranded-along-gulf-coast/1471163001/
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More than 260 dolphins found stranded along the Gulf Coast since February. Scientists aren't sure why.
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More than 260 dolphins found stranded along the Gulf Coast since February. Scientists aren't sure why.
Scientists are trying to determine why more than 260 bottlenose dolphins have been found stranded along the Northern Gulf of Mexico since the beginning of February.
The number of dolphin deaths is about three times higher than the average for the time period, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday.
The strandings in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the panhandle of Florida have been declared an Unusual Mortality Event, or UME.
A UME is defined under the Marine Mammal Protection Act as "a stranding that is unexpected; involves a significant die-off of any marine mammal population; and demands immediate response."
Dead dolphins in Delaware:Dolphins keep washing up in Delaware. Why?
Plastic trash:2-foot-long plastic shower hose pulled from dead dolphin's stomach
Researchers said it is too early to discern the cause of the deaths because many of the dolphins recovered are very decomposed, making it harder to determine why they died. Some carcasses have been stranded in remote locations, which made it difficult for scientists to recover or examine them.
Some of the stranded dolphins had skin lesions associated with freshwater exposure, which is being investigated as a possible contributing factor, NOAA researchers said. In addition to skin lesions, dolphins can suffer from abnormal blood chemistry, swelling of the cornea and even death if they are exposed to low salinity water for an extended time.
Researchers said high levels of rainfall and flood control actions have altered the flow of freshwater in dolphin habitats this year. Dolphins in the area also suffered health problems after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 that may make them more susceptible to the effects of low salinity.
Thousands of whales are dying:Scientists have run out of public beaches for the carcasses to rot
Deepwater Horizon spill:Trump administration set to ease offshore drilling safety rules created after 2010 BP oil spill
The BP oil spill's effects included problems with lungs and adrenal glands, which produce stress-related hormones, blood abnormalities and general poor condition, according to earlier reports. The report said the spill contributed to the Gulf of Mexico’s largest and longest dolphin die-off.
An investigative team will work with the Working Group on Marine Mammal Unusual Mortality Events to evaluate the situation and guide the investigation, which may take months, NOAA said.
Scientists asked members of the public who encounter stranded or dead dolphins to keep a safe distance and call the Southeast Marine Mammal Stranding Hotline at 877-WHALE HELP (877-942-5343), or notify the U.S. Coast Guard.
'Marine mammals strand for a reason':Dead dolphin calf's stomach held plastic bags and balloon, scientists discover
Dolphins and climate change:Warming seas are devastating to survival of marine mammals
Contributing: The Associated Press
Follow N'dea Yancey-Bragg on Twitter: @NdeaYanceyBragg
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ea2966755187894b00fd7219242b9d26
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/01/13/did-google-ceo-larry-page-just-make-his-first-big-mistake/
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Google CEO Larry Page Just Made His First Big Mistake
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Google CEO Larry Page Just Made His First Big Mistake
Even before In the Plex author Steve Levy's cogent post on Thursday about this week's uproar over Google 's new social search moves, which nodded to Google CEO Larry Page's possible role in the affair, I was already beginning to think it had Page written all over it. If so--and how could he not have been deeply involved in such a huge change to Google's core service?--we could be looking at the first evidence of a significant downside to the Google cofounder's management style.
Up to now, Page has gotten mostly kudos during his nine-month reign. Investor 's Business Daily, in fact, named him the CEO of the Year. And while that pick drew some objections (and some support), it has been clear for some time that Page has remade the company to be more nimble. Not long after Page took over, for example, Google announced plans to buy Motorola Mobility for more than $12 billion, its biggest acquisition yet by a factor of four. The deal, which is under government scrutiny, was hailed by some and criticized by others, but no one disagreed that it was unusually bold.
But what if Page is too bold for Google's own good? We won't know that, most likely, for at least a couple more years, depending on how Google navigates through treacherous competitive and regulatory waters. But with the latest kerfuffle, it's time to ask if Page is not just bold but, in some cases, rash. In that Investor's Business Daily article, it's telling that Alan Eustace, Google's senior vice president of search, said of Page, "His view is that speed is everything."
This week, that penchant for swiftness hit a speed bump when Google introduced the awkwardly named Search, plus Your World. Now, Google's search results not only highlight Google+ postings for those signed into Google, but the search results page also has a box at upper right with suggestions on "People and Pages" to follow on Google+ related to the search terms. Although Google offers a prominent button at the top of the page to allow users to switch to non-personalized results, the socially infused results are the default.
Immediately, many people, even some such as search expert Danny Sullivan who generally believe Google's a good steward of search, swooped in to cry foul. Some worried about privacy (though no one sees anything they couldn't see before), but most critics believed it was unfair of Google not to include Facebook and Twitter in that box of Google+ suggestions. Others thought the appearance of Google+ links in the search results, sometimes pushing Twitter and other links down, went too far.
A lot of people, including me, thought the criticism of Google's attempt to promote its social network was overblown (Google helpfully listed many of these positive comments in a post today), especially given that Facebook is close to as dominant in social as Google is in search. It seems even more doubtful that this will inevitably lead in a Microsoft-level antitrust case, as some folks suggest, especially because it's so easy to find examples in nearly every search of links to Twitter (if not to Facebook, which more tightly protects its corner of the Web).
Nonetheless, the furor almost by definition proves that Google handled this clumsily, probably by moving too quickly and forcefully. And that's the mistake that makes me think of Larry Page. By many accounts, he has reenergized Google, so I don't mean this as a blanket criticism. But his social sense (ironically) has never seemed finely tuned, at least when it comes to anticipating public reaction to Google's actions. (To be fair, that's not just a Larry problem historically; Google has often misgauged likely responses to its actions.) But in this case in particular, he and Google should have known that this radically new and Google+-slanted search would set off especially loud alarms, and no doubt some people inside Google did. But the company went ahead anyway.
The thing is, Google could have handled all this better. It could have labeled that Google+ box on the right as a promo; who could object to a clearly labeled house ad? It could have made the new social search results opt-in, rather than making them the default, while still promoting the social search enough to get a lot of people to try it. After all, it has previously hawked Google+ on its famously spartan home page, to little criticism. It could have done the standup thing and included publicly available Facebook and Twitter profiles in the righthand box.
But I have a feeling--sheer speculation, I warn you--that Page wanted to make a bold statement, and damn the consequences.
And who knows? Maybe it will work out great. Maybe antitrust and privacy concerns go nowhere. Maybe Twitter or Facebook gets elbowed into doing a deal with Google that would make those social results far more useful and less controversial. Maybe. In basketball, they say, if you don't get any fouls, you aren't trying hard enough. But I'm not sure it always works that way in business.
I don't think Google's mistake is as big as many people make out. It needed to incorporate social signals into search. But in the way Search, plus Your World was implemented, a mistake it certainly was. And it's one that Google will be dealing with for a long time to come.
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82d805c0e5e2686d7f7e6419ecca1066
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/01/17/will-jerry-yangs-resignation-finally-shake-up-yahoo/
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Will Jerry Yang's Resignation Finally Shake up Yahoo?
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Will Jerry Yang's Resignation Finally Shake up Yahoo?
Jerry Yang... in better times
Struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo just announced that its cofounder and "chief Yahoo," Jerry Yang, has resigned. It's unclear at this moment how this will affect Yahoo, which recently chose a new CEO, Scott Thompson. But it's the surest sign yet that Yahoo may finally be able to make some substantial changes that investors have been clamoring for for years now.
Those possibilities include not only an outright sale of the company--despite Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock's recent vow that Yahoo would remain independent--but also the sale of Asian assets. (Yang is also leaving the boards of Yahoo Japan and Alibaba, substantial portions of which Yahoo owns.) The departure of a prominent cofounder like Yang also might pave the way for other radical restructuring, though it's not yet clear what form that might take beyond laying off more workers or continuing to prune away underperforming properties. (Eric Jackson, longtime Yahoo investor and activist, has several other suggestions, including buying back stock, issuing a special dividend, and taking on more debt.)
Yang founded Yahoo in 1995 with Stanford friend David Filo, who still works at Yahoo, and the pair created the iconic company of the early Web. Even today, Yahoo remains one of the select few companies online with an audience of several hundred million people. And its advertising business, while now paling next to Google and even still-private Facebook, is still one of the Web's largest.
But in recent years, Yang, who served as CEO from June 2007 to January 2009, has been blamed for preventing or fumbling the sale of the company to Microsoft in 2008 for more than double Yahoo's stock price today. He also has been implicated in the Yahoo board's failed attempts to turn the company around as it keeps losing ground to Google, Facebook, and countless other faster-moving startups.
Not only is Yang leaving his always fuzzily defined operating roles, he also is leaving the Yahoo board. That may be the most significant move, since Yang carried considerable weight on a Yahoo board constantly criticized for being among the most dysfunctional in business today. Indeed, AllThingsD's Kara Swisher now reports that four other board members are headed out the door as well, most likely Bostock, Arthur Kern, Vyomesh Joshi, and Gary Wilson.
It's not often a good thing when a founder of a company leaves, but in this case, unfortunately for Yang, investors are likely to be cheering the news. Its shares, in fact, are up almost 4% after-hours today.
As Thompson considers Yahoo's next moves, Yang's departure may help clear the way for the new CEO to make bigger changes than he might otherwise have been able to do with a powerful cofounder in place. And he's got a list of big changes he must make if Yahoo is to avoid fading even further.
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32f100224c1c5ebc5f92eb890c6aae44
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/01/19/googles-q4-revenues-miss-forecasts-stock-falls-9/
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LIVE: Google's Q4 Revenues Miss Forecasts, Stock Falls 9%
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LIVE: Google's Q4 Revenues Miss Forecasts, Stock Falls 9%
Despite early signs that online advertising, and search ads in particular, continue to grow rapidly, Google reported its fourth-quarter 2011 revenues rose a disappointing 25%, to $10.58 billion--and sales net of payments back to other sites that are ad partners was only $8.13 billion, noticeably less than analysts' forecast of $8.38 billion. Profits of $9.50 a share also came in far short of the $10.49 Wall Street was expecting.
As a result, Google's share were plunging almost 10% in extended trading, after rising 1%, to $639.57, at the close before earnings were released. An early look indicates that growth slowed in the important fourth quarter, since it was slower than for the full year, which saw revenues rise 29%.
The main culprits, explained in more detail below: A big ($240 million) hit from foreign currency exchange, lower search ad prices, changes in search and ad quality (showing fewer ads), a weak European economy, and an impairment charge on Google's interest in wireless service provider Clearwire.
Here are a few highlights from the analyst call (keep refreshing up until about 2:30 p.m. Pacific to get the latest). After the call notes is the full press release. On the call are CEO Larry Page, CFO Patrick Pichette, sales chief Nikesh Arora, and ad product head Susan Wojcicki.
Page comes on, saying he's "very happy" with the results (unlike investors).
He says the number of Google+ users has hit 90 million, double one quarter ago (though he doesn't say if those are active users). He also nods to last week's controversial search changes, which elevated Google+ posts in results.
He says Google has closed 12 more product lines, including Buzz (an earlier social network play).
There are now 250 million Android devices out there, up 50 million from a quarter ago. And there are 11 billion downloads from the Android Market app store.
Chrome, Google's browser, is "on fire" too.
Enterprise, that is Google Apps, is going great too, he says.
He notes that Google just topped Fortune's list of the top places to work, announced today.
2012 promises to be a fantastic year, he says. (All in all, you'd never know from Page's sunny comments that investors are not quite so pleased.)
Now over to Pichette. Currency rates hurt Q4 revenue to the tune of $240 million. Google Network revenue was hurt by the search changes made last year. And there was an impairment charge for Google's share of Clearwire. Also, Bloomberg reports that European weakness had an impact, though I missed whatever comment Pichette made on that.
Arora goes over the sales details. Google growth over the holiday season.
Sales team has driven innovative ad products, including helping drive in-store sales to advertisers and helping them use search more often for branding, vs. the usual direct-response.
Display advertising has an annualized run rate of over $5 billion, thanks to the ad exchange and TrueView video ads on YouTube. We continue to activate the display ecosystem.
Mobile bookings have increased by 12 times in 2011.
In Enterprise, we're seeing great traction, both large and small companies. More than 5,000 new customers signing up for Google Apps every day.
Wojcicki outlines ad products for the quarter. She starts talking about the changes from the new personalized results--she loves them (naturally)! Launched 20 ads quality improvements this quarter. Sometimes cost per click and click rate get affected one way or another.
Now it's on to analysts' questions.
One question is on changes in search and the impact on ad revenues, but Wojcicki doesn't provide new insight as far as I can hear.
Q: Did macro economy play a role in results? Pichette defends the Q4 as very solid, minus the foreign exchange issue.
Q: What goes into the $5 billion display run rate? What's the blended TAC rate? Pichette: Won't answer that last. But it includes Google Display Network, YouTube, and some mobile.
Q: Can you quantify growth on YouTube in particular--and are TV ad budgets moving to YouTube? Pichette: YouTube is doing absolutely terrific. Page says the growth is significant, but not compared to overall video ad space. Don't see TV ad budgets moving significantly yet.
Q: What's the monetization potential for Android beyond mobile search? And are people more often going directly vertical search sites or direct to sites like Amazon to find products--does that explain the slowdown? Page on the first question: We see a lot of potential to make money on Android--but no details. Pichette on the second question: Not really.
Q: What is the vision of how Google+ can increase engagement across Google properties? And what about data from Twitter etc.? Page: Engaging with users is really really important. We're at the early stages of that. The notion of identity is a deep part of what we're doing. As for the "walled-garden" data from others, hope to use more than that.
Here are the basics from the press release:
"Google had a really strong quarter ending a great year. Full year revenue was up 29%, and our quarterly revenue blew past the $10 billion mark for the first time,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “I am super excited about the growth of Android, Gmail, and Google+, which now has 90 million users globally – well over double what I announced just three months ago. By building a meaningful relationship with our users through Google+ we will create amazing experiences across our services. I’m very excited about what we can do in 2012 – there are tremendous opportunities to help users and grow our business.” Google reported revenues of $10.58 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2011, an increase of 25% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs (TAC). In the fourth quarter of 2011, TAC totaled $2.45 billion, or 24% of advertising revenues. Google reports operating income, operating margin, net income, and earnings per share (EPS) on a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. The non-GAAP measures, as well as free cash flow, an alternative non-GAAP measure of liquidity, are described below and are reconciled to the corresponding GAAP measures at the end of this release. GAAP operating income in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $3.51 billion, or 33% of revenues. This compares to GAAP operating income of $2.98 billion, or 35% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2010. Non-GAAP operating income in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $4.04 billion, or 38% of revenues. This compares to non-GAAP operating income of $3.38 billion, or 40% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2010. GAAP net income in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $2.71 billion, compared to $2.54 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010. Non-GAAP net income in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $3.13 billion, compared to $2.85 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010. GAAP EPS in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $8.22 on 329 million diluted shares outstanding, compared to $7.81 in the fourth quarter of 2010 on 326 million diluted shares outstanding. Non-GAAP EPS in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $9.50, compared to $8.75 in the fourth quarter of 2010. Non-GAAP operating income and non-GAAP operating margin exclude the expenses related to stock-based compensation (SBC). Non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS exclude the expenses related to SBC and the related tax benefits. In the fourth quarter of 2011, the charge related to SBC was $536 million, compared to $396 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. The tax benefit related to SBC was $114 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 and $89 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP operating income, operating margin, net income, and EPS are included at the end of this release. Q4 Financial Highlights Revenues – Google reported revenues of $10.58 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011, representing a 25% increase over fourth quarter 2010 revenues of $8.44 billion. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting TAC. Google Sites Revenues - Google-owned sites generated revenues of $7.29 billion, or 69% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2011. This represents a 29% increase over fourth quarter 2010 revenues of $5.67 billion. Google Network Revenues - Google’s partner sites generated revenues of $2.88 billion, or 27% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2011. This represents a 15% increase from fourth quarter 2010 network revenues of $2.50 billion. International Revenues - Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $5.60 billion, representing 53% of total revenues in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 55% in the third quarter of 2011 and 52% in the fourth quarter of 2010. Excluding gains related to our foreign exchange risk management program, had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the third quarter of 2011 through the fourth quarter of 2011, our revenues in the fourth quarter of 2011 would have been $239 million higher. Excluding gains related to our foreign exchange risk management program, had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the fourth quarter of 2010 through the fourth quarter of 2011, our revenues in the fourth quarter of 2011 would have been $39 million lower. Revenues from the United Kingdom totaled $1.06 billion, representing 10% of revenues in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 10% in the fourth quarter of 2010. In the fourth quarter of 2011, we recognized a benefit of $25 million to revenues through our foreign exchange risk management program, compared to $25 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. A reconciliation of our non-GAAP international revenues excluding the impact of foreign exchange and hedging to GAAP international revenues is included at the end of this release. Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, increased approximately 34% over the fourth quarter of 2010 and increased approximately 17% over the third quarter of 2011. Cost-Per-Click – Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, decreased approximately 8% over the fourth quarter of 2010 and decreased approximately 8% over the third quarter of 2011. TAC - Traffic acquisition costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google’s partners, increased to $2.45 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to TAC of $2.07 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010. TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 24% in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 25% in the fourth quarter of 2010. The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our Network members, which totaled $2.01 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $442 million in the fourth quarter of 2011. Other Cost of Revenues - Other cost of revenues, which is comprised primarily of data center operational expenses, amortization of intangible assets, content acquisition costs as well as credit card processing charges, increased to $1.25 billion, or 12% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to $877 million, or 10% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2010. Operating Expenses - Operating expenses, other than cost of revenues, were $3.38 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011, or 32% of revenues, compared to $2.51 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, or 30% of revenues. Stock-Based Compensation (SBC) – In the fourth quarter of 2011, the total charge related to SBC was $536 million, compared to $396 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. We currently estimate SBC charges for grants to employees prior to January 1, 2012 to be approximately $2.0 billion for 2012. This estimate does not include expenses to be recognized related to employee stock awards that are granted after December 31, 2011 or non-employee stock awards that have been or may be granted. Operating Income - GAAP operating income in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $3.51 billion, or 33% of revenues. This compares to GAAP operating income of $2.98 billion, or 35% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2010. Non-GAAP operating income in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $4.04 billion, or 38% of revenues. This compares to non-GAAP operating income of $3.38 billion, or 40% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2010. Interest and Other Income (Expense), Net – Interest and other income (expense), net was an expense of $18 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to an income of $160 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. Income Taxes – Our effective tax rate was 22% for the fourth quarter of 2011. Net Income – GAAP net income in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $2.71 billion, compared to $2.54 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010. Non-GAAP net income was $3.13 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to $2.85 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010. GAAP EPS in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $8.22 on 329 million diluted shares outstanding, compared to $7.81 in the fourth quarter of 2010 on 326 million diluted shares outstanding. Non-GAAP EPS in the fourth quarter of 2011 was $9.50, compared to $8.75 in the fourth quarter of 2010. Cash Flow and Capital Expenditures – Net cash provided by operating activities in the fourth quarter of 2011 totaled $3.92 billion, compared to $3.53 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010. In the fourth quarter of 2011, capital expenditures were $951 million, the majority of which was related to IT infrastructure investments, including data centers, servers, and networking equipment. Free cash flow, an alternative non-GAAP measure of liquidity, is defined as net cash provided by operating activities less capital expenditures. In the fourth quarter of 2011, free cash flow was $2.97 billion. We expect to continue to make significant capital expenditures. A reconciliation of free cash flow to net cash provided by operating activities, the GAAP measure of liquidity, is included at the end of this release. Cash – As of December 31, 2011, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term marketable securities were $44.6 billion. Headcount – On a worldwide basis, Google employed 32,467 full-time employees as of December 31, 2011, up from 31,353 full-time employees as of September 30, 2011.
Here are a few highlights from the analyst call beginning soon (keep refreshing up until about 2:30 p.m. Pacific to get the latest).
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be85700e31070b1335f65614e530b205
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/01/19/online-ad-revenues-to-pass-print-in-2012/
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Online Ad Revenues to Pass Print in 2012
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Online Ad Revenues to Pass Print in 2012
Thanks to even more bullish forecasts, spending on online ads will pass that of combined newspaper and magazine advertising for the first time this year.
That historic shift is according to a new report from eMarketer. The reasons eMarketer cites are not surprising: more people spending more time online, a perception that online ads are more measurable, and a growing comfort by advertisers in ad campaigns that integrate multiple channels, including online. Nonetheless, television will remain dominant through at least 2016, according to eMarketer.
Highlights of the report:
Online Will Pass Print for First Time in 2012: US online advertising spending, which grew 23% to $32.03 billion in 2011, is expected to grow an additional 23.3% to $39.5 billion this year-pushing it ahead of total spending on print newspapers and magazines, according to eMarketer. Print advertising spending is expected to fall to $33.8 billion in 2012 from $36 billion in 2011. Online Growing Even Faster Than Expected: eMarketer's previous US online advertising forecast from July 2011 was among the more bullish estimates issued during the year-forecasting 20.2% growth to $31.1 billion in 2011-yet consistently stronger-than-expected results from major industry players and the IAB/PwC benchmark through the first three quarters of 2011 contributed to the upward revision. Total Ad Spending is Growing Too: Despite concerns about the troubled economy among agencies and marketers, total ad spending in the US is expected to rebound in 2012 after rising 3.4% to $158.9 billion in 2011, according to eMarketer. US total media ad spending will grow an estimated 6.7% to $169.48 in 2012, boosted by the national elections and summer Olympics in London, eMarketer estimates. TV is Steadily Up: Spending on TV advertising grew 2.8% in 2011 to $60.7 billion, eMarketer estimates. This year, TV ad spending will grow an estimated 6.8% to $64.8 billion-driven the Olympics and election-while remaining resilient from worries about the soft economy. Digital remains the sole bright spot for newspapers and magazines: eMarketer estimates US digital newspaper ad revenues grew 8.3% to $3.3 billion in 2011. Print advertising revenues at newspapers fell 9.3% to $20.7 billion in 2011. At magazines, US print ad revenues are expected to rise 0.5% to $15.34 billion in 2012, up from $15.3 billion last year. US digital advertising spending at magazines grew 18.8% to $2.7 billion in 2011.
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baf810f3990bede2704d55e83484edad
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/02/01/the-100-billion-ipo-question-can-facebook-keep-growing-fast-enough/
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The $100 Billion IPO Question: Can Facebook Keep Growing Fast Enough?
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The $100 Billion IPO Question: Can Facebook Keep Growing Fast Enough?
As the world awaits Facebook's imminent filing for its initial public offering of stock, the biggest question in the minds of investors and the rest of us is this: Can Facebook keep growing so fast?
Facebook has come very far, very fast, amassing more than 800 million users and earning up to $4.3 billion in revenues in 2011, double 2010's gross. But in the end, the success of this most iconic IPO in nearly a decade depends squarely on whether Facebook's breakneck growth looks to continue.
It's no sure thing. After all, mighty Google missed fourth-quarter forecasts two weeks ago, knocking its stock down almost 10% the next day. Despite a slowly improving economy, some ad agencies and marketers said online ad spending growth slowed in the fourth quarter. (Others, it should be said--like Hulu CEO Jason Kilar today--said Q3 was slow and things picked up in the usually big Q4).
Although reports from comScore and social agency TBG Digital indicated Facebook's advertising did well in the fourth quarter, they're not conclusive. TBG's report didn't include one big game advertiser, probably Zynga. And the profit challenges of Zynga--whose social games are played largely on Facebook and which is believed to be one of Facebook's biggest advertisers--came to light in its less-than-stellar IPO in December. The travails of such a large Facebook advertiser raise questions about whether Facebook's revenue momentum continues. Indeed, the latest rumor of Facebook's revenues, tweeted by CNBC's Julia Boorstin on Monday, was $3.8 billion, noticeably short of eMarketer's much-cited $4.3 billion forecast.
Only Facebook insiders know for sure if the company's incredible momentum continues. And the filing--now seemingly on track for just hours from now following a board meeting today--may well banish any doubts. But no matter what the numbers turn out to be, I wanted to get a little more color on the company's very recent advertising business than Facebook might be willing to share in its S-1. So today, I talked to a bunch of social marketing experts, mostly at agencies and marketing software and services firms.
The gist of their remarks: Some advertisers remain unconvinced that the new kinds of social-infused ads its sales force is trying to sell will work for their brands, making it uncertain the company met its own, no doubt ambitious fourth-quarter targets. But Facebook likely did better, perhaps much better, than its rivals in the fourth quarter. And even in the event that the company contracted sniffles during the fall cold snap, business is accelerating so far in the new year.
The ad experts also believe Facebook has only started to exploit the potential of its massive audience, with several more possible ad products and services to come this year. But they think the uneven rollout of those products also could make Facebook's revenues volatile for some time to come.
In a little more detail, here's what they're seeing:
* Cory Treffiletti, chief marketing officer and cofounder of Amplify Social, a brand-focused digital marketing spinout from digital agency Catalyst S+F: "A lot of people [in digital advertising] said Q4 was the slowest quarter of the year," he says, maybe because of the uncertain economy. While it's not clear to him that Facebook suffered from that slowdown, spending plans for Q1 look promising. "People who have advertised on Facebook are still advertising on Facebook," he says.
But one reason they're continuing to advertise reveals the dirty little secret of Facebook ads: They're cheap--which is to say, Facebook can't charge that much for them because very few people click on them. They're busy sharing and poking, not shopping. But Facebook makes a lot of money overall on the dimes and quarters those little ads on the right side of the page bring in because it sells a ton of them--which explains the comScore report that Facebook now leads onetime display-ad leader Yahoo by a mile now.
* Matt Lawson, VP of marketing for Marin Software, a management platform for search, display, and social ads: He saw no slowdown in advertising in Q4, at Facebook or elsewhere. "We saw spikes on Facebook that were similar to those in search," he says, particularly on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. While two-thirds of Marin's clients view Facebook as a medium best suited to brand advertising akin to television, the direct-response marketers looking for immediate purchases or registrations--the folks buying those cheap ads--spent the lion's share of the ad money on Facebook.
* Digital agency executive who prefers to remain anonymous: "I've heard Facebook has had some challenges getting big commitments from some marketers" for the much more expensive (meaning lucrative for Facebook) brand ads sold directly by Facebook's sales force. "Unsophisticated agencies are still buying a lot of this expensive inventory," which goes for up to $12 per 1,000 impressions (CPM) vs. the 25 to 40 cents CPM that its self-serve standard ads get. That's one reason Facebook's ad executives have expressed confidence about these ads. But as Yahoo's troubles have shown, a business that depends on big ad deals can be volatile.
* Jon Elvekrog, CEO, and John Manoogian III, chief technology officer of 140 Proof, a social ad company: The cofounders, who admit they have worked less with Facebook than with Twitter (thus the name, a play on the number of characters in a tweet), think Facebook is starting to emerge from a long bout with "Googleitis." That's the tendency of ad companies to create ad systems that look like Google's, which is to say automated and focused on direct-response.
Such has been the case with Facebook's ads until recently, they say, when the company has begun to see results from "a pretty big pivot toward a brand- and audience-centric approach" in the last six to 12 months, says Manoogian. Still, the pair thinks Facebook remains mostly dependent on direct-response ads, a business that Elvekrog notes "isn't exactly broken" at close to $4 billion in revenues. "But that momentum may slow them from changing too much too quickly" toward the brand focus that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and most ad folks think should be its ultimate mainstay.
* James Borow, CEO of GraphEffect, which makes social marketing software for brands and agencies: Facebook's social ads, such as Sponsored Stories, which turn someone's Like of a brand into an ad shown to their friends, started taking off last year, he says. "Brands are really starting to embrace Facebook as an always-on medium a lot like television," says Borow. As a result, he says Q4 was the best yet for his company, largely because of Facebook's success.
* Roger Barnette, president of ad management platform IgnitionOne: Most of his clients are not brand advertisers but direct marketers, which need to drive potential customers offsite to complete a purchase. "Facebook just doesn't do that well on those types of campaigns," he says, because users prefer to stay on Facebook when they're there. Barnette is starting to see some traction in Sponsored Stories, which brands use to get people to visit their Facebook Pages. "But it's early days, so there might be some ups and downs."
* Patrick Toland, U.S. managing director of Facebook ad platform TBG Digital: "All of the biggest Facebook advertisers are increasing their spend," he notes, from companies seeking credit-card applications to social game makers trolling for new players to brands that want to turn people into fans of their Facebook Page. One client, he says, is upping its Facebook ad spend from $4 million a month recently to $15 million a month in February. Another is increasing planned Facebook spend from $8 million last year to $20 million in 2012. "We're not seeing any slowdown in the business," he says. "If you're going to advertise in social, you're going to advertise on Facebook."
What's more, he thinks Facebook is just getting started. In the coming year, Toland thinks Facebook will roll out more diverse ad units, perhaps along with a self-serve option that would make it much easier to place ads. He also thinks Facebook will launch mobile advertising as well as an ad network like Google's AdSense.
* Blake Cahill, CEO of ad agency Banyan Branch: He has seen a big increase, often a doubling, of ad spending by his clients, though not necessarily out of enthusiasm for Facebook. "They need to spend more in order to get their messages through in people's news feeds, because there's just much more content coming at people," he says. But they're also getting results: One client spent five figures on a contest on Facebook and netted 50,000 new fans in recent weeks, an amount he says would have taken a couple of years to get without the ads. To handle the additional demands, Cahill just hired someone dedicated to media buying and placement for Facebook campaigns.
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7418a2054b3134d67b15bc0afad4ca36
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/02/08/fourth-quarter-loss-aside-heres-the-real-reason-groupon-is-no-amazon/
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Fourth-Quarter Loss Aside, Here's the Real Reason Groupon Is No Amazon
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Fourth-Quarter Loss Aside, Here's the Real Reason Groupon Is No Amazon
The Case of the Missing Robocopter
Image via CrunchBase
As Groupon prepares to report the results of its fourth quarter later today, investors will be looking for answers to a fundamental question about the daily-deals service: Is it the next Amazon.com, as CEO Andrew Mason and his team of 10,000 clearly hope? Or is it the next Pets.com?
Honestly, the results, Groupon's first as a public company, won't provide an answer, if only because its fate likely won't come down to such a stark choice.
UPDATE: Following Wednesday's market close, Groupon reported a loss of 2 cents a share on revenues of $506.5 million, just under triple a year ago. That compares with a 3-cent profit on $475 million revenues analysts had forecast. Although the small loss clearly is a disappointment to some investors, driving the stock down 11% in initial after-hours trading, the reaction could be the result of short sellers covering their positions before the report. Investors may react more positively to the higher-than-expected revenue growth and first-quarter outlook. Indeed, after the start of the analyst call, which you can view here, shares are now down 6%, though they remain volatile. UPDATE 2: Volatile is right--post-call, they're now down 15%. Looks like Mason & Co. weren't too convincing. Investors liked neither the Q4 revenue slowdown (even if gross came in higher than expected) nor the Q1 outlook.
But as unlikely as Groupon is to unravel like that famous sock puppet, I think it's also pretty doubtful it will reach Amazon's pinnacle either. And it has nothing to do with its already hefty valuation (Amazon's was criticized too, early on), the post-IPO slump in its shares (stocks rise, stocks fall--so what?), its competitive challenges (Amazon had plenty early on, even if nobody remembers them today), or even Mason's antics (which accomplished their goal of getting Groupon attention).
My problem with Groupon is that I'm not sure it started with the one core value that matters: a singular focus on delighting customers. Much deeper than a buzzword, this focus informed Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos' every decision, every incentive he set up for the company and its employees. He spent lots of money to make sure customers were happy, even when it made investors unhappy.
That doesn't mean that I think Groupon doesn't want to please its customers. I'm sure it's sincere when it says it does, in unambiguous terms, on its Web site. But one experience I had during the holiday season made me question how deep the commitment goes. Here's what happened:
Nov. 23: I get a Groupon offer for a cool-looking remote-controlled helicopter from a U.K. outfit called Extreme Fliers. Christmas gift for my daughter, who has always been fascinated by them at a local park? Sure, at only about $30 for a $70 product, I'll give it a try. The order process through Groupon and Extreme Fliers is baroque, but once done, I get an immediate confirmation from Groupon and Extreme Flier.
Dec. 7: I begin to wonder why it hasn't arrived, but a visit to the Web site mentions huge demand--nothing unusual for a Groupon--and assures visitors that the copters are on their way.
Dec. 22: OK, I realized awhile ago that I shouldn't count on this for a Christmas present, but I still want the copter, so I email Extreme Flier asking what's up. After all, when I check on the order at the Web site, it says it was shipped.
Dec. 29: I get an email back from Extreme Flier:
Hi, your order was dispatched before Christmas. please keep me updated. Thanks Orlando
Oh, I will. And thanks for letting me know, more than a month after I placed the order--and four days after Christmas. I write Groupon, too, telling them I haven't received the product, and get a fast response:
Hi Robert, Thank you for the email. I am truly sorry for the delay. Please let me know if you have received this item yet so I can look into this further for you. Regards, Eric S Groupon Customer Support
Well, no, I reply, I haven't gotten it. That's why I'm writing.
Dec. 31: Groupon writes back asking what the order number with Extreme Flier is. They don't know?
Jan. 1: Another email from Eric S, whom I give points for doing this on New Year's Day:
Hi Robert, I can't apologize enough for the delay here. While we're excited to offer unbeatable deals on great products, we're new to delivering things and still ironing out the kinks. We've learned a lot from this experience, and we're confident that things will go smooth as butter next time around. I've passed your information along and we will be checking the status of this order directly with the business. Again, I'm so sorry for this delay and any inconvenience this has caused. Regards, Eric S Groupon Customer Support
Jan. 11: Still no word, so I write Groupon back asking what's up, again.
Jan. 12: Groupon responds:
Hi Robert, The merchant should be reaching out to shortly regarding this issue. I apologize again for the delay.
Feb. 3: More than three weeks later, still no word from Extreme Fliers, or Groupon. I fire off an email to Groupon asking whether it's ever going to get handled, or perhaps I should do a chargeback with Visa?
Feb. 4: Groupon customer service acknowledges my updated complaint this way:
Hi Robert, Thank you for contacting Groupon. Due to the high e-mail volume, we are running behind our normal 24 hour response time. We are battling this volume with every tool we have at our disposal and feel confident that we will emerge victorious. This victory will result in a detailed response to your email, a swift resolution of your issue and a warm feeling in your belly. If you have further questions or if your issue has been resolved, please reply directly to this e-mail.
Feb. 6: Finally, Groupon throws in the towel:
Hi Robert, I can't apologize enough for the delay here. While we're excited to offer unbeatable deals on great products like these, we're new to delivering things and still ironing out the kinks. Given the trouble you've had with this order, I've just canceled this order and issued $29 Groupon credit to your account. The credit is available in your account immediately and does not expire. You can see your available credit by selecting "My Account" or "My Gifts" from the drop down menu that appears when you place your cursor over your name in the top right corner of www.groupon.com. Your available credit will be displayed in the white box to the right. We've learned a lot from this experience, and we're confident that things will go smooth as butter next time around. Again, I'm so sorry for this delay and any inconvenience this has caused.
Actually, I'd like my money back rather than a credit to a service I'm now less enamored with. And the cut-and-paste sentiment is less convincing this time. But OK, better than nothing. A bit later that day, I get a message from Groupon saying my refund has been processed:
Hi Robert, Everything went smoothly and your Groupon for Extreme Fliers has been refunded. You were refunded $29.00 worth of Groupon bucks. Your Groupon Bucks are immediately reflected in your Groupon account.
There's that word again, "smooth." Right. I realize, however, that I also paid Extreme Flier $4.95 for shipping, so I email Groupon about that. I'm waiting to hear back. UPDATE: I heard back, and they're crediting me $6 for the shipping. Nice.
By the way, Extreme Fliers is still showing a page for the Christmas delivery schedule of the copters. Helpful!
Now, let me be clear: Extreme Fliers is the one that really dropped the ball here. Groupon itself handled this reasonably well overall, given that reality. It responded to most of my inquiries fairly quickly, hit most of the right customer-service notes on the emails, and eventually came through with something resembling a refund. But that's not really what I wanted. I wanted a Christmas gift for my daughter.
And so they've already lost me, at least for Groupon Goods. Assuming I'm not alone, that's a problem for Groupon, since Goods is a major leg of its expansion plans. Indeed, it's one that investors are counting on, according to a Feb. 7 report from Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney--and it's one that's utterly critical if Groupon is to challenge Amazon.
Amazon also makes mistakes, and I have seen occasional reviews on product pages that indicate it doesn't always fix them to customers' satisfaction either. But from my own experience, it fixes mistakes just about every time, quickly.
It has done that from the very beginning, and that's the key. While other companies talk about being "customer-centric," almost no one would dispute that Amazon actually is. For all the technology and infrastructure scale it has built, I think this quality is why it remains the dominant online retailer by far.
Groupon may well get a handle on this, as Amazon and to some degree eBay have with third-party sellers. And it gets more points for making the effort than many online retailers I've dealt with. So it's quite possible that Groupon will get past what are clearly growth pains and create the world-class company that Andrew Mason aspires to build. Indeed, in the Q4 conference call, Mason said Groupon does followup emails, surveys, and tracks other measures to flag problems. That's good.
But just as I mostly stopped bothering to save a few bucks buying on eBay because of the occasional problems, so I plan to keep buying on Amazon and in local stores unless somebody else provides a very good reason not to. And that's something Groupon hasn't managed to do.
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831ed2c73a5eeb28efcab38b88c03127
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/03/14/google-we-killed-130-million-scam-ads-in-2011/
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Google: We Killed 130 Million Scam Ads in 2011
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Google: We Killed 130 Million Scam Ads in 2011
To hear recent news about Google's lucrative online ad system, you might think it's suddenly a haven for all manner of scammers, counterfeiters, and other shady outfits. Not so, Google insists, and today it embarked on a charm offensive to prove it.
None too soon. Last August, the search giant was slapped with a huge $500 million forfeiture of revenues for letting Canadian pharmacies place Google ads that led to illegal sales of prescription drugs to U.S. consumers. The Justice Department prosecuting attorney accused CEO Larry Page of knowing about the situation for years. Then in November, Google (and later Yahoo and Microsoft) agreed to cut off 500 advertisers associated with 85 alleged online mortgage fraud schemes that targeted struggling homeowners. And in January, Google was shown to be running ads for illegal Olympics ticket resellers in the U.K.
Clearly, if this kind of activity starts to give Google users pause before they click on those little text ads on the right of search results pages and on its network of partner Web sites, it could endanger the company's $35 billion-plus in annual ad revenues. So it's no wonder Google aims to show that, for all bad ads that have gotten through, it's trying really, really hard to stop them. And, it claims, it's getting better at it.
To try to prove that, it's running a blog post today that includes a typically cute video (above) explaining the process by which it weeds out bad ads and advertisers. It's also releasing several never-before-revealed stats on how well it's doing that job.
The new information probably won't convince the skeptics and critics who think Google will do most anything, good or evil, to generate more ad revenues. But it does shed more light than ever before on the extent to which Google is escalating its effort to stop scammers that advertise on its AdWords system--even if it admits it will never stop them all.
The details of Google's ads quality operations have been closely guarded. Despite today's insights, they remain so. But the basic process works like this:
Google spends tens of millions of dollars a year--$60 million in 2010 alone, it revealed last year and likely even more in 2011--to employ hundreds of engineers and ad policy experts who develop and refine automated systems for catching scams. These systems, constantly adjusted to incorporate new information on scams, scan and analyze each of the many billions of ads Google runs every year ad before any of them run. Almost instantly, they determine whether each ad meets or violates Google's ad policies.
Those that clearly violate them--such as an ad with misleading claims such as "lose weight guaranteed!", or that points to a site that installs malware on visitors' machines, or that sells obvious counterfeit goods ("Air Jordans 80% off")--all these get rejected immediately. Others that look legitimate, based on the system's previous experience with proven legit ads and sites or a positive history with that advertiser, get approved automatically.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google engineering senior VP
Last year, Google says, the company disabled more than 130 million ads out of an undisclosed number of billions submitted--most of them before they ran, says Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google's senior vice president of engineering for AdWords. Ramaswamy says that, based on running sample queries and examining the ads that run on search results pages or on Google's network of Web site partners, Google also reduced the percentage of bad ads by 50% last year over 2010.
Google goes after the advertisers themselves, too. Last year, it shut down 800,000 of them, a huge jump from 250,000 shut down in 2010. That's partly due to the growth of Google's ad business overall, but mostly it's because as Google has continued to crack down, scammers keep opening new accounts that Google then identifies and shuts down again. Of that 800,000, some 150,000 were accounts that tried to advertise counterfeit goods, up from around 100,000 in 2010. More than 95% of them were caught through Google's detection systems, the rest via outside complaints.
One reason Google has been able to step up its pursuit of scam ads is that it constantly refines its "risk model," which analyzes combinations of keywords, an account's payment history, landing pages that people who click on an ad get sent to, and many more factors to detect more precisely the advertisers violating its policies. Google did a major update on its risk model last year, with another coming soon.
More recently, late last year it improved what it calls its "query watch" for counterfeit goods. It's paying closer attention to keywords and queries that its systems have associated with past counterfeit goods problems, so it can catch more of them before they run.
The ad system also spits out so-called edge cases--ads and sites that may or may not be legit, so they're initially rejected, or removed if they're already running. These cases, also generated when advertisers appeal a rejection, require real humans to review them. Google employs ad policy experts to review such ads and sites. That can take time, given the volume of ads. Google said today that it has speeded up its manual review process, partly by staffing up in offices in Dublin and India, partly by streamlining the review process. It's now promising 24-hour response time on complaints about an ad.
Despite all the apparent improvements, it's still unclear to what extent Google is beating the bad guys. Yes, a lot of ads and advertisers have been banished from the system. But that's out of billions of ads and millions of advertisers. Google won't provide a specific denominator, either on ads run or ads loaded into Google's system but stopped before they run. So while I get the sense that the rate of bad ads that end up running is well under 1%, we don't actually know.
Ultimately, none of this provides a definitive answer to the basic issue of which of Google's competing interests--its users, its advertisers, and itself--truly holds the upper hand. Google has always said it's users first. Arguably, that has been the case more often than not, maybe much more often. Indeed, Google's advertisers often complain about how much the company restricts them.
But if basic economic theory means anything, it's also tough to deny that Google has an economic incentive and to some degree a mandate from shareholders to maximize its revenues in the short term. Critics such as Harvard assistant professor Ben Edelman (who to be fair has had Google rival Microsoft as a client) contend that the company has repeatedly run illegal or misleading ads despite warnings and the ability to catch more scams with its ad technologies.
For its part, Google contends that it has an even more important incentive: If people come to think that too many Google ads are scams, they're not going to click on them and Google suffers. "A segment of people are reluctant to click on our ads, because they don't trust them," concedes David Baker, director of engineering for advertising. "So shutting down these ads, I think, will make Google a heck of a lot of money. If we fix that, Google makes its next tens of billions of dollars." Some outside ad experts agree. "Ads quality is the differentiator for them," says David Fall, COO of online ad platform Clickable.
The one thing's indisputable is that Google has a never-ending battle on its hands. "Do you think scammers will stop?" Ramaswamy asks rhetorically. Indeed, do a search on "stop foreclosure," a term flagged in a Consumer Watchdog report, Liars and Loans: How Deceptive Advertisers Use Google, and you'll still see ads for companies that at least appear shady, with tactics such as pitching a $40 book when you try to close the page. No matter how many scammy ads Google has eliminated, it will always have more to kill--and more people to convince that it's doing an adequate job.
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5fcb33589f520e5291e35c3e7d438466
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/04/16/report-facebook-ad-rates-jump-despite-first-sign-of-glut/
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Report: Facebook Ad Rates Jump Despite First Sign of Glut
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Report: Facebook Ad Rates Jump Despite First Sign of Glut
Facebook is heading into its likely May initial public offering on a full head of steam, judging from a new quarterly report out this morning on its advertising business by social ad management firm TBG Digital.
The first-quarter report says Facebook's average cost per thousand impressions, or viewings (known as CPM) those 41% from a year ago. In just the last quarter, CPMs are up 15%. And cost per click (CPC) rose 23% over the fourth quarter in the top five territories, the U.S., the U.K., Canada, France and Germany. The report is based on 372 billion ad impressions from 235 clients in 190 countries.
The upshot, says TBG CEO Simon Mansell: Facebook is earning more money per impression or click despite upping the number of ads on most pages from six to seven in January. "That means demand has increased significantly," he says.
Advertisers aren't exactly happy with that, of course, because they're paying more and more. "Some advertisers find it frustrating," says Mansell, because last year they got used to ads being relatively cheap on Facebook relative to the clicks or other metrics they track.
It's particularly vexing for latecomers trying to build a fan base on Facebook, because now it is considerably more expensive to do so. In fact, cost per fan is already up 43% from the fourth to the first quarter, according to TBG. "And the pricing is only going to go up," adds Mansell.
Clearly, that hasn't yet discouraged advertisers from spending more. Facebook's ad sales could rise 60% this year to more than $5 billion, according to a recent forecast by eMarketer.
But there is one worrisome sign: The U.S. saw an 8% reduction in the number of clicks each ad gets on average, and the top five territories for Facebook ad sales saw an average decline of 6%. Why? Mansell figures it's because of that hike in the number of ads running on a page. More ads means more choices and fewer clicks for each ad.
More concerning, though, I wonder if the decline means that the ad blindness so endemic to banner ads on the open Web could be hitting Facebook as well. That's not the kind of thing it needs when it faces hard-charging competitors such as Google in display ads.
It will be up to advertisers all the more, says Mansell, to make their ads more engaging or face declining results. So far, the results of those efforts have been mixed.
There was one big bright spot in clicks. News saw a nearly threefold jump in click-through rates as social readers such as apps from the Washington Post and Yahoo News attracted lots of new fans. It's an indication, says Mansell, that Twitter now has significant competition as a distributor of news.
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79ddf90e9a107c1d687e9cce21f1adad
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/04/18/12-candidates-to-become-the-next-instagram/
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12 Candidates to Become the Next Instagram
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12 Candidates to Become the Next Instagram
There's no more excitement and hype in online media today than in mobile services and applications, all the more since Facebook just paid a billion bucks for the mobile photo sharing service Instagram. This morning at the venerable DEMO conference in Santa Clara, a group of Instagram wannabees presented to a ballroom full of investors and press.
These are my capsule summaries, followed by comments from two panels of venture capitalists and corporate investors.
Arqball: Anyone can create "spins," interactive 3-D data sets, with their phone. You can take a photo/video of an object and then you can spin it around and otherwise manipulate it with swipes on your mobile device. It's for people selling stuff to create much more compelling representations of their products.
XEOPlay: It's debuting Tiltworld, an iPhone game where people donate to causes.
Edamam: Universal recipe search from your phone, with nutritional information and fast ingredient lists for easy in-store shopping.
UppSite: Turns any website into an app in minutes. (Correction: It works on WordPress.org, WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, Tumblr and Blogger.)
Fribi: Social giveaway app that allows you to swap goods with friends, as well as for nearby merchants to sell or provide coupons.
TourWrist: You can shoot and share 360-degree panoramic photos. Useful for real estate virtual tours, travel, defense, gaming, education, etc.
On the panel judging this first batch of startups were Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital; Jason Krikorian of DCM; Dan Scholnick of Trinity Ventures; Dana Stalder of Matrix Partners; and moderator Jolie O’Dell of VentureBeat.
On Arqball and TourWrist: Scholnick thinks this imaging is powerful, but the question is really what the business model is. They may be too complicated for consumers, so software may be the play. Gurley thinks TourWrist is visually stunning, though challenges for the business model as well. You might want to charge the real estate agent or homeowner or merchant for the service.
On Tiltworld: Stalder says the trick is competition for people's time.
On Edamam: Gurley isn't convinced recipes is the highest-value application of what he says is a different kind of search from Google's algorithms (parametric or taxonomy-based search).
On UppSite: Gurley says there's a market need for this, but the question is how well the technology works. Of all the companies, this one has the biggest acquisition likelihood.
On Fribi: Stalder says the pursuit of a better Craigslist is a big idea, but it's very hard to beat the network effect of an established company. Krikorian says it might be a good feature inside an neighborhood app like NextDoor. Gurley thinks there's a bigger opportunity than "freecycling."
And the second set of mobile startups:
Daemonic Labs: Its Dabble app for iPhone and the Web is a location-based photo journal--essentially creating a postcard and leaving it virtually where the photo was taken.
Toopher: Uses the location of your smartphone to eliminate identity theft. It can log you out of your computer when you walk away from it, or when you go to bed.
MyGeoTrex: Mobile app that lets anyone share location-based info privately with a company or with the public. You can visit the zoo and have info on the Bengal tiger come up on your phone, or share a multimedia presentation of your vacation with friends.
Unshared.TV: An iPad app that lets you view video streams from friends even if they didn't specifically share them.
TrustGo Mobile: App to protect mobile users from viruses.
iGenApps: Lets anyone with no programming knowledge create an iPhone app from their phone.
On the panel of investors for the second set of startups were Mike Abbott of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Joe Kraus of Google Ventures; Claire Lee, head of partnerships for Microsoft's Emerging Business Team; Peter Pham, cofounder and partner with incubator Science; and moderator Jolie O’Dell.
On Toopher: Abbott says he liked it, though there could be issues if you're indoors. Lee says it's a very competitive market. Kraus thought it was the biggest of the ideas in this batch. In short, this was the investor favorite.
On TrustGo Mobile: Kraus says it's promising, but this is a slugfest of a category. Also, most of the companies are ahead of the demand, since we haven't seen a big mobile security disaster yet. Abbott liked the list of certified sites it offers.
On Dabble: Question is how unique is this. Lee says it's such a crowded area--Foursquare, Path, Glympse, etc. She finds the notion of memories a bit fuzzy. Kraus thinks annotating the Web hasn't really taken off despite 15 years of attempts.
On MyGeoTrex: Modern version of those audio tour devices? Lee thinks the concept is excellent but the design needs work. Kraus doesn't believe there's a company here, because the rise of mobile means every app will have to be location-aware, so this company can't own all that. Pham hated the user interface.
On Unshared.TV: Pham says it will struggle to build an audience, because YouTube is where people share video. Lee didn't get it either.
On iGenApps: Abbott says it's a good idea but there's not a great history of app tools turning into big companies. Lee wonders how the apps will be distributed. And it's a pretty competitive landscape.
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cb9a79eeb563e417b6d3b9a5a0005953
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/05/07/as-facebooks-social-ads-take-off-maybe-that-100-billion-ipo-isnt-so-crazy/
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As Facebook's Social Ads Take Off, Maybe That $100 Billion IPO Isn't So Crazy
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As Facebook's Social Ads Take Off, Maybe That $100 Billion IPO Isn't So Crazy
As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg embarks on his company's initial public offering roadshow today, he's facing a new round of skeptics, especially advertisers, who wonder whether the social network can fulfill the sky-high expectations that come with its $100 billion IPO. It hasn't helped that in the first quarter, Facebook's revenues actually fell vs. the fourth quarter, suggesting a loss of momentum at a critical time.
But now it looks like advertisers are quickly warming to the signature ad formats on which Facebook is betting its future. That's the upshot of data to be released Tuesday from online ad management firm Marin Software.
In the last year, the percentage of Facebook ad budgets spent on social ads--those such as Sponsored Stories, or posts from friends that an advertiser pays to highlight--has risen from 5% to 23%. And according to Marin, social ads will swallow half of Facebook ad budgets by the end of this year.
What's more, the cost per click of social ads has jumped 86% from a year ago. By contrast, Marketplace ads--those text-and-a-dinky-photo ads that appear down the righthand side once you click past the main home page, have seen cost per click fall 15%. Last month, social agency TBG Digital said also reported that Facebook's ad rates jumped in the first quarter.
Not least, people are clicking more often on Facebook social ads. Click-through rates rose 78% from a year ago. They'e still quite small at well under 1%, however--considerably lower than many display ads. Facebook has been encouraging marketers to look at other metrics, such as brand recall, which it said last year was 68% higher with social ads vs. other Facebook ads. But advertisers still care about click-throughs, which allows them to compare results to other ads. And many remain uncertain about how best to advertise on Facebook.
The increased purchases and prices of social ads are thanks to several reasons, says Matt Lawson, Marin's vice president of marketing. For one, of course, Facebook is pushing them to advertisers. They're the only ad currently that can appear inside people's news feeds, for instance. And Lawson suspects Facebook has tweaked its algorithms to raise the visibility of the ads, which generally cost more than Marketplace ads.
While Facebook has a number of ways it can crank up revenue growth, Lawson says the company has a lot more to do: offer more innovative ad formats, move quickly into mobile ads, and most of all educate marketers on how best to measure the results of those ads.
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87bf92c7d21cd889bc48d55313a5372a
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/05/22/the-top-10-tech-trends-according-to-5-top-tech-vcs/
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The Top 10 Tech Trends, Straight From 5 Top Tech VCs
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The Top 10 Tech Trends, Straight From 5 Top Tech VCs
Everyone in Silicon Valley wants to know what's coming next, and every year for the past 13 years, a panel of the most forward-thinking minds in technology and tech finance convenes here to provide a look at what innovations are likely to emerge in the next few years.
Tonight it's time again for the Top 10 Tech Trends dinner, hosted by the Churchill Club, which puts on a bunch of Valley events with top tech folks every year. It will be interesting to see how the predictions at this 14th annual version will differ from last year's.
This year, the panel is especially venture capital-heavy, but these folks are also, to a person, heavyweights in the Valley, so their opinions carry special weight. On the panel: Kevin Efrusy, general partner at Accel Partners; Bing Gordon, investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock and executive chairman and cofounder of LinkedIn; panel regular Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; and Peter Thiel, president of Clarium Capital. Moderating the festivities in place of longtime emcee Tony Perkins, Churchill Club cofounder with Forbes Publisher Rich Karlgaard, are Forbes' own Eric Savitz, San Francisco bureau chief for the magazine, and Managing Editor Bruce Upbin.
The panel portion of the dinner, which attracts several hundred people (you can watch it live here for a fee), starts at 7 p.m. Pacific at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. The audience gets to vote--in past years, with red and green cards as well as electronic voting devices. This year, they'll be using a Twitter-based polling system. Panel members have similar red-green paddles they hold up. I'll post the highlights as they happen.
And we're underway. Eric and Bruce will describe each trend and then the owner of that trend, one of the panel members, will explain it.
1) Radical Globalization of Social Commerce: Efrusy explains that companies today will be instantly global, or they will fall behind those that aren't. For the previous Web generation, international was a distinct minority. Groupon, for example, was half international when it went public last year. If you want to be the leading global player, just leading the U.S. might not be enough. You can't wait to win the U.S. and then open an office.
The other panel members wave half-red, half-green panels. Gordon, who waved a red, says that's going to take awhile. Hoffman, also red, said the U.S. is still the most important. Thiel's in-between, I think, but because he thinks it's not very interesting. Jurvetson says it's true, but 12 years old. It's what every consumer Internet startup has been doing for 12 years. Thiel on second thought thinks it's a worthwhile rule to go international early to avoid local copycats.
The audience shows mostly greens, matched by about 70% supporting the trend on TwitPolls.
2) Zero Marginal Cost Education: Public education faces massive disruption. Gordon (not Thiel, who has been flogging the excessive cost of college) says public schools are not very productive. Moore's Law improves better than we're growing great teachers. Anytime you see an industry propped up by monopolist unions and deferred investment, you know it's tired. At Stanford University, great professors can get 150,000 students, not 150. We just can't do it in ballrooms. People who grew up digital don't like sitting around and listening to experts talk. "Technology can enable better education" seems to be Gordon's message.
The panel is all greens. Hoffman agrees, but the point is the amplification of what people do. Khan Academy is an example. Enabling networks of people to communicate--EdModo, K-12 social network. They do reduce the cost, but it's also reaching more people and making them powerful. Efrusy says he has three boys in Palo Alto schools, so he has seen the problem. (I've got one daughter and she's thriving there. So there.) This needs to be reinvented and in a hurry. Thiel agrees with the trend but wonders if it will happen very fast. People in the middle class don't know what else to do, so they teach. (Oh please.) Schools function as a babysitter. (Oh please again--will have to do a separate post on tech folks who think they know how to teach and what education is all about.) Jurvetson says his 12-year-old boy taught himself programming on the Internet. I share Peter's despair with the existing system.
Audience is mostly green, same with the Twitpolls.
3) Massive Sensors and Data: Nearly free sensors mean they will be everywhere, gathering massive data. Hoffman, whose trend this is, says this combines with mobile computing devices, social media, and the cloud to create new applications that can tap into and make sense of all this data, from entertainment to medicine to traffic control.
All greens on the panel (and 80+% on the TwitPolls). Gordon says first we have to get algorithmicists, as he calls them, off advertising and onto big data. Thiel says he's most interested in how this will play out in the trend to a much more transparent world--good and bad. Ubiquitous government surveillance, home security systems. Efrusy says it's too easy to assume more data is better, but a lot of it is not useful, or at least not very salable. It reminds him of the notion of eyeballs a decade ago. There's a lot of data that is just garbage. Jurvetson says the near-term challenge is interpreting all this data. He also implies that there will be just a few people controlling a cortical layer of data over everything, coming to a very bad end. (Uplifting, Steve.)
On TwitPolls, 84% like this trend.
4) All Vehicles Go Electric: So says Jurvetson, though he admits it won't happen in the five-year time frame of the event. So what will be catalytic in five years? It's more efficient to burn ethanol or oil centrally and turn it into electricity than in vehicles. Total cost of ownership of all the couple of dozen electric vehicles coming out in the next two years is less than a Taurus. There are now 200 million electric vehicles in China, mostly scooters. So a billion cars won't shift, but a billion minds will.
Panel goes all red. Efrusy says natural gas will be first, but maybe not in five years either. Fracking means the incentive is for gas for the foreseeable future. Thiel thinks batteries are fundamentally old, based on chemistry. Electric cars have to recharge too quickly and have to be replaced too often. And oil prices are still too low. Jurvetson says batteries last 200,000 kilometers, not the 30,000 Thiel says. Hoffman says he mainly disagrees with the time frame, and he also thinks hybrids will rule for some time. Gordon thinks America just isn't ready, unless it loses the trade war to China or 20-year-olds start voting.
Lotsa reds in the audience ("like the Politburo," says Eric). On TwitPolls, 65% say no.
5) A Shift Toward Technocracy: Doing More with Less: Thiel says this is in stark contrast to both Democrats' and Republicans' beliefs. Technology can help make government services much more efficient, so that's an important area for entrepreneurs to look for opportunities. (Convenient view for a libertarian VC.) Education, DMV, rockets, etc.
Panel looks split. Jurvetson, a fence-sitter, isn't sure if Thiel is saying this will happen in the next five years, or should. Thiel says both. Michael Bloomberg is doing this in New York, says Hoffman, though he thinks progress will be slow. Gordon thinks Thiel's idea is too much of a slogan. It's more the government part that Efrusy reacts to, because he think making the cost of something cheaper means you do a lot more of what it enables--and that includes government, which will make itself even more powerful. We'll try to starve the beast, but government can print money.
The audience is split too, but about 60% against.
6) It's Just the Venture Cycle: The fortunes of Silicon Valley follow a 14- to 16-year cycle, separate from the macro economy. Bruce has no idea what this means (nor do I). Efrusy explains that today's apparent bubbles are merely typical VC investment cycles--from the PC and associated applications to the Web. He figures the leaders of the next cycle are about 7 to 12 years old right now, so be nice to your kids or grandkids. Why always 14 to 16 years? Because that's a generation. The new platform needs to be invented by a kid.
Three reds, one green. Thiel says you can't depend on standard cycles--you have to work at it. Hoffman says the time frame is accelerating, with disruptive trends coming in faster and faster, thanks to Moore's Law as it hits other industries. Jurvetson, the only green paddle, shows a chart that basically shows there is a twin eight-year cycle of VC and private equity, roughly adding up to that 16 years. (I admit I don't quite see the point of the chart.) Gordon notes that 16 years equals about two orders of Moore's Law improvement, so that may be the bigger reason for that cycle.
The audience is split, probably meaning they don't get it either.
7) The Gamification of Everything: The battle for engagement will drive game mechanisms, says Gordon, a longtime game guy at EA and at Kleiner. Once you buy into a system of meaning with virtual rewards, it self-sustains. She who dies with the most points wins. Hoffman wonders how far he's going: the gamification of toilets? Everything that competes for consumer attention, Gordon says. He bets there will be a gamified toilet in five years, probably in Japan. "Everybody Poops" is going to be a game.
Missed the paddles. Hoffman disagrees with the "everything" claim but thinks a lot will be gamified. Ditto for Jurvetson. He thinks routine work holds the most promise for gamification. Thiel also thinks gamification has an ambiguous meaning. (Agreed--we're well into the buzzword stage for this.) In fact, Efrusy seems to agree, saying that gamification can be shallow and fail to have lasting impacts. Better to just build a great application than gamify it.
A little under 60% of the audience disagrees with the trend (though maybe because they're older--Gordon says it would be 90% yes in high schools).
8) The New Hardware: Bits to Atoms: Open source hardware, collective design, flexible limited-run manufacturing, 3-D printing. Hoffman, whose idea this is, says we'll see revolutions in product design--eventually you'll see printing of a new heart, though not in the next five years. You'll also see personalized genetic medicines (a trend years ago by KP's John Doerr if I remember).
Two greens, one red, and an in-between from Gordon, who thinks hardware and software people don't really get along, so this is going to be harder than we hope. Jurvetson thinks it's going to happen but not as much in the next five years as he might hope. The cost and clumsiness of 3-D creation gets in the way. Thiel agrees with the trend because so much can be done at the outset with software that it's easier to create the physical product in a more customized way. Gordon just thinks it's best in the long run to "short" atoms in favor of bits.
About two-third agree with the trend, despite a lot of red cards in the physical audience.
9) Moore's Law Accelerates Beyond Silicon: The dropping cost of computation will accelerate, not drop off, as we move beyond silicon. Jurvetson, the promoter of this trend, shows a chart that Moore's Law over the last 110 years continues to accelerate. Just about everything disruptive in innovation relies on this. A lot of people predict this will end in silicon. But we'll have other kinds of improvements, new systems of computation and architecture or ways of building computers, maybe molecular computing. OK, Jurvetson goes on one of his trademark speed-talking binges--he's excited about this.
Three reds, one green. Thiel, a red, seems doubtful because nobody's talking about it or creating fundamentally faster computers. Efrusy also disagrees because he doesn't know what the standard beyond silicon will be and the ecosystem hasn't formed yet around it. Hoffman, another red paddle, simply thinks Moore's Law and the existing ecosystem around silicon will carry the day because it's doing just fine all by itself.
The clearly optimistic audience goes nearly 60% for this trend. (Though Gordon jokes that the Intel table here is all red.) (For what it's worth, my gut says Jurvetson will be right, eventually.)
10) The Beginnings of Bioinformatics: Intelligent Design Over Random Drug Discovery: Thiel, this trend's owner, believes that testing millions of drugs more or less randomly is a method due to end. You need a very different model. If there's going to be a future in biotech, it has to be a much more information-driven approach. Genomics was overhyped, but a number of companies are applying it in interesting ways. We can better model drug effects.
The panel is all in. Jurvetson thinks we're on the cusp of reengineering the systems of biology. It's the continuation of Moore's Law, says Hoffman. How soon will we see commercially available products? Thiel says the question will be how well they work; if they work well, the FDA could expedite them and we could see drugs designed like this in five years.
And the audience vote: 100% agree! Wishful thinking, maybe? OK, now down to 93%, but still. It's so favorable that now the VCs wonder if they need to invest against it.
All in all, the trends seems slightly underwhelming--most I've heard before. But Jurvetson's acceleration of Moore's Law looks at once the most sweeping and the most sensible.
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3235f0b756e66dedb353dc67f6a66ee1
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/06/05/google-makes-renewed-grab-for-the-rest-of-online-advertising/
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Google Makes Renewed Grab for the Rest of Online Advertising
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Google Makes Renewed Grab for the Rest of Online Advertising
New DoubleClick ad system heats up battle to create an operating system for digital marketing
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Hundreds of well-funded online ad technology companies have sprouted up in recent years, each aiming to make it easier and more efficient for marketers to reach just the target audience they want.
Terence Kawaja, CEO of boutique investment bank Luma Partners, created this now-famous Display... [+] Lumascape to show how complex the online ad tech industry has become.
Yet the result is a crazy quilt of companies--graphically illustrated in that mess of a chart on the right--that drives marketers and agencies crazy. The very existence of so many competing products, in fact, has made placing ads online and measuring their impact more complicated and cumbersome than ever. “Venture capital has supported and financed a bunch of chaos,” advertising veteran Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau, griped at a recent ad conference.
The result: Most ad dollars, nearly $200 billion a year, still get spent on television because it’s so much easier.
That’s the problem Google aims to solve with a revamped ad buying system it will announce today at a private Future of Advertising event hosted by its DoubleClick display-ad management and technology unit. (Part of the event will be livestreamed here.) The company, which already dominates 60% of the online ad business--those little text ads that appear on the right and top of the page when you do a search--now has its sights set on the remaining 40% of the industry. That would be the $25 billion worldwide market for display ads, the graphical and video banners familiar on virtually every commercial website.
Neal Mohan, Google's VP of display advertising products
Google's goal: Provide the leading one-stop shop for advertisers and publishers to buy ads on websites, mobile phones, social networks, apps, and whatever other new media the Internet spawns. Essentially, it’s building an operating system for ads much like Microsoft did with its Windows for PCs--with much the same appeal to marketers and agencies as Windows has for PC users. “When you’re putting together a campaign, you want everything connected vs. trying to piece it all together,” says Kurt Unkel, president of the online ad buying operation at Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi digital ad agency, a Google partner.
Google’s announcement is the latest salvo in a war to control the next era of digital marketing. After a decade in which Google’s search ads overtook display ads with an unmatched ability to turn clicks directly into sales, many advertisers and publishers expect--or at least hope for--a resurgence of new kinds of display ads that could woo brand advertising dollars from TV. Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display advertising products, has predicted that display will be a $200 billion industry in a few years.
So it’s no surprise that a pitched battle is underway to become the key “platform” for display ad buying. The long list of combatants, each of them coming at it from different angles, includes not only familiar rivals Google, Yahoo, and AOL, but also a handful of ambitious ad tech companies such as Mediaocean, AppNexus, and Operative, and software companies Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle.
With DoubleClick, which Google bought in 2007 for $3.1 billion, the search giant already has the leading software that thousands of marketers and agencies use to place display ads on websites. Partly as a result--coupled with the growing success of its YouTube video service and mobile ads--Google's display revenues are running at a $5 billion-a-year clip, or 10% of its overall revenues, the company said in January. That’s double the rate it cited five quarters prior--possibly even faster than Facebook, whose ad revenues rose 69% last year but have since slowed to 37% growth in the first quarter.
Unlike in search, however, Google is still far from dominant in display. So in the last couple of years, it has steadily snapped up companies to provide more pieces of the online ad buying business, from creating ads to putting up ad space for auction on stock market-like ad exchanges such as DoubleClick’s AdX to measuring the ultimate impact of ads on consumers.
Problem is, each of those products uses different software that doesn’t easily share data. That leaves marketers and ad agencies struggling to cobble them together to get campaigns done. That wastes a lot of time and money and hobbles the instant feedback that makes online advertising compelling. “None of these is integrated in the way advertisers want,” concedes Mohan.
Susan Wojcicki, Google's senior VP of advertising
Google hopes to change all that by rewriting the software code for all those products so that marketers can share data among them instantly, speeding up the creation and placement of ads and the measurement of their impact. For instance, a studio releasing a new movie DVD could run search and display ads across the Web, social networks, and mobile devices and measure how well each is working in real time--something that’s currently difficult and sometimes impossible using many disparate products. “We’re bringing some of the science of search to the art of display,” Susan Wojcicki, Google’s senior vice president of advertising, said in an interview.
Google is starting the revamp, which will roll out over the next several months, with its signature ad server DoubleClick for Advertisers. That's the control panel for buying ads on websites, which (for ad tech geeks out there) will now be called DoubleClick Digital Marketing Manager. It also rewrote software from Invite Media, a company it bought in mid-2010. Renamed DoubleClick Bid Manager, it helps agencies automate the purchase of ad space on Google’s ad exchange and others such as OpenX and Yahoo’s Right Media, allowing marketers to reach very specific audiences across millions of websites. Also getting integrated into the overall DoubleClick Digital Marketing suite are a rewritten search ad buying system, Google's late 2009 acquisition of Teracent, which helps advertisers create customized variants of ads for target audiences, and its analytics service.
No one outside Google yet knows if the company has actually connected the myriad pieces of the ad buying process as seamlessly as it’s promising. At least one rival reached before the announcement said he hadn’t seen evidence so far. “Google is saying they’re one integrated stack, but in reality, it’s a Frankenstein of their acquisitions,” says former DoubleClick executive Michael Rubenstein, now president of AppNexus, which is building what it hopes will be an open ecosystem of ad tech partners whose products will work more smoothly together. “Google is often said to be executing very well, but it looks that way only because no one else is.”
But even some competitors confess that for many marketers, Google is increasingly the easy choice. “They have integrated the pieces so well and are providing phenomenal service,” says Bill Wise, CEO of agency ad buying firm Mediaocean, which is trying to expand into a broader "app store for advertising" to rival Google's internal package. Jared Belsky, executive vice president at digital agency 360i, says Google is also gaining momentum in display thanks to improved customer service. For instance, he says, agencies no longer need to talk to nine different people at the company to get an issue resolved.
At the same time, Google's increasing power in display worries some advertisers and agencies that want to avoid getting locked into a single company's "stack" of ad technologies. “Once you go with a stack, breaking up is very hard to do,” says Altimeter Group digital marketing analyst Rebecca Lieb. Although by most accounts Google allows outside software to be used freely with DoubleClick’s, there’s also widespread worry that the company is trying to capture too much of the industry’s revenues for itself. Moreover, some publishers and advertisers perceive an inherent conflict: By owning both media properties such as YouTube and even its own search results pages, as well as the software to dole out ads to them, Google is in effect both player and dealer in a casino, as digital media veteran Darren Herman, chief digital media officer at the agency Media Kitchen, recently put it.
Wojcicki says DoubleClick’s success with publishers and advertisers alike proves those aren’t big concerns. Nonetheless, Google’s approach presents a stark choice for marketers and their agencies. Although Mohan says the revamped system should make it easier yet for marketers and agencies to plug in third-party services, he says that unless a marketer uses the entire Google system, it’s likely the integration of various kinds of ads and networks won’t be as seamless. For instance, marketers have found it highly effective to target people who searched on a product, but didn’t buy it, with a follow-up display ad on the next few websites they visit. If a marketer uses a product other than DoubleClick Search to place search ads, it may not be able to do that.
Google’s biggest challenge is providing a seamless package that isn’t frozen in time. After all, it clearly missed the social marketing wave, at least so far, and in the new DoubleClick package, “social is a huge missing piece,” says Lieb. Google has given no timetable for adding social marketing to DoubleClick, even as other companies dive in--such as Salesforce.com buying social marketing service Buddy Media on June 4 and Oracle buying Vitrue on May 23. “That’s going to limit the future viability of this product,” says Lieb.
Indeed, thanks to the rapid pace of innovation, all this ad tech chaos is unlikely to abate anytime soon. Agencies and marketers will continue to try new technologies and media, and many of them won’t be from Google. “Google won’t get all the dollars in a campaign,” says 360i’s Belsky. “The modern media planner still wants choice.” As much as Google’s clean, well-lighted place for online ads will appeal to many marketers and agencies, the battle for display dollars won't be decided for years to come.
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cc5cd27fd74d5d5b6b557e32137bfe63
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/06/13/facebook-to-debut-ad-exchange-in-bid-to-boost-revenues/
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Facebook to Debut Ad Exchange in Bid to Boost Revenues
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Facebook to Debut Ad Exchange in Bid to Boost Revenues
Facebook will debut an advertising exchange in the next few weeks that will help advertisers target audiences on the social network in the same way they've been able to do elsewhere on the Web. That may help Facebook boost its revenues to counter worries by investors, who have knocked its stock down nearly 30% from its initial public offering last month.
The exchange will allow a select group of ad tech companies called Demand-Side Platforms, or DSPs, which gather pools of target audiences that advertisers can reach instantly through automated buying systems, to get access to such audiences on Facebook, according to spokesperson Annie Ta. They haven't been able to do that before because Facebook only allowed them to target ads using its own data on posts or brands that users Liked or shared, or on information about themselves that the revealed in their Facebook profiles.
Using what's known as real-time bidding on the Facebook Exchange, a travel site, for instance, could target an ad on Facebook for a discounted air ticket to Hawaii to people who searched for a Hawaii flight but didn't buy a ticket, or an ad for a Honolulu hotel room to someone who did buy a ticket.
Facebook Marketplace ads
The exchange will allow advertisers to run only standard Marketplace ads--those little text-and-a-photo boxes on the right side of Facebook pages. They're not the "Premium" ads that run alone on people's opening Facebook home pages, nor the more overtly social ads such as Sponsored Stories. Facebook is betting those latter ads will be more effective over time than its standard ads because they are essentially natural posts by people that marketers pay to make sure they appear to people's friends, making them more likely to be noticed. But it's believed that most of Facebook's revenue currently comes from more standard Marketplace ads.
Targeting through the Facebook Exchange will be done through cookies, little pieces of code that identify where an anonymous browser has been around the Web--the common method used by advertisers on the open Web. Facebook has started placing its own cookies on anonymous browsers on its site so that advertisers can identify that they're the same person who browsed particular sites elsewhere on the Web.
Advertisers, however, will not be able to mix in Facebook data on its members to refine that targeting. So the main advantage for advertisers is simply being able to reach people when they are on Facebook the same way they reach them when they are surfing the rest of the Web.
That's potentially huge in itself, because Facebook boasts nearly a billion active monthly users, who spend hours a month on the site. No longer will those hours be lost to advertisers. What's more, recent browsing data may be more of an indication of intent to purchase a product or service than stated interests or Likes--or at least advertisers may think so--so the ads may be more successful than some of the targeting currently available on Facebook.
For Facebook, the move is likely to raise the amount it can charge for its nearly limitless ad space, which is widely believed to command relatively low rates. It's not clear how much this will boost its revenues, but if the resulting targeted ads prove more relevant to users, prices should rise as advertisers will be willing to bid more for the space.
As AllThingD's Peter Kafka points out, this is not the ad network that Facebook has long been rumored to be considering. That would run Facebook ads on other websites, like Google does with its lucrative AdSense network. But Facebook has steadfastly said it has no near-term plans for an ad network.
Of course, the more relevant those ads are, the more they could raise more privacy concerns for Facebook: Too relevant, and people might get creeped out. They can opt out of this targeting, but not through Facebook--only through the DSPs, which can be difficult to do. However, these ads also will sport the little "X" that lets you get rid of an ad, and clicking on it will send you to information that directs you to the DSP's website to opt out. Facebook itself won't be building user profiles based on the exchange.
The DSPs approved to participate so far are AdRoll, AppNexus, DataXu, MediaMath, TellApart, TheTradeDesk, Triggit, and Turn. (Not, it seems so far, Google's own DSP, Invite Media.)
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e54df7b27d8151dff3a3d3facecc7130
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/06/14/heres-one-thing-google-and-facebook-can-agree-on-fighting-scam-ads/
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Here's One Thing Google and Facebook Can Agree On: Fighting Scam Ads
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Here's One Thing Google and Facebook Can Agree On: Fighting Scam Ads
Google recently has stepped up a drive to stop ads that hawk counterfeit goods or send people to sites that try to scam them or install malicious software on their computers. But up to now, Google and other companies from AOL to Facebook have attacked the problem individually, leaving holes in their defenses.
On June 14, the nonprofit group StopBadware, backed by Google, PayPal, Mozilla, and others, will launch the Ads Integrity Alliance to present a more united front to scammers and also educate policymakers on potential legal or legislative remedies.
StopBadware was formed in early 2006 as an experimental anti-malware project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and since spun out into a nonprofit group, supported by Google, Sun Microsystems, and Lenovo. Executive Director Maxim Weinstein says bad ads are a natural extension of the mission, partly because malware often is distributed via online ads. "It's a similar threat in that it undermines trust in the Web," he said in an interview. "Those ads are what pay for all the services on the Web."
Although Google and no doubt others spend millions of dollars a year to fight bad ads--Google alone disabled 134 million bad ads and banned 824,000 advertisers last year--scammers continually exploit automated and human safeguards and loopholes in site policies. "The more companies can learn, the better," says Weinstein. "Once you get to a consistent set of principles, the bad guys find it harder to squeeze through."
At least that's the hope. Which is why arch-rivals are working together on the alliance. Charter members helping to fund the initiative are Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, but others are expected to join. It's not yet clear precisely what the alliance will do beyond fuzzy goals of developing industrywide policies on what's often called malvertising and setting up a private forum for members to discuss tactics.
But if it's anything like parent StopBadware, it will function as an information clearinghouse for fighting scammy ads, at least for its members. StopBadware has served as a sort of court of last resort for websites caught in Google's malware net, providing human review to complement Google's mostly automated system.
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1ffb82752681bc07e60088f669adf20a
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/07/03/reports-facebook-ad-spending-growth-fades-could-drop-even-more/
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Reports: Facebook Ad Spending Growth Fades, Could Drop Even More
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Reports: Facebook Ad Spending Growth Fades, Could Drop Even More
Facebook logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Despite recent signs of sunnier weather ahead, a cloud of doubt about the prospects for Facebook's advertising business continues to hang above the company, putting a damper on shares still well below their initial offering price. Two new reports do little to dispel the gloom.
In a survey due out later this morning, social marketing analytics firm 33Across says client advertising agencies and brands are focusing less of their attention on Facebook compared with the rest of the Web. That doesn't speak directly to their budgets, but sentiment is important too.
Of the 2,200 agencies and brands surveyed in June, 80% said the "rest of Web" gets more of their team's attention now than Facebook, up 11% from March, well before Facebook's May IPO. Some 71% of respondents said they're now spending 80% of their attention on the rest of the Web vs. Facebook, up 23% from March.
Finally, when asked the money question, "Do you see your Facebook spend changing vis-a-vis the rest of the Web?" more than five times as many in June compared with March said they're planning on reducing their Facebook budget. That's vs. the rest of the Web, not on an absolute basis.
Although 33Across didn't ask specifically about General Motors' well-publicized pullout of ads from Facebook, 33Across marketing Chief Marketing Officer Allie Kline said it likely had an impact on other marketers (even as GM talks to Facebook about returning). "GM doesn't pull out of things just out of a personality issue," she said. "That allowed some others to pull back a little on their commitment to spend on Facebook."
Mind one caveat: 33Across bills itself as the "rest-of-Web compass" for advertisers. It collects data on social interactions from a number of non-Facebook sources to provide tools and analytics to marketers and publishers, so it has an interest in promoting the concept that advertisers need to avoid focusing too much on Facebook.
And in a sense, the numbers aren't entirely surprising. Since Facebook is just one site, albeit a very big one, it's natural that most advertisers' budgets aren't going to that one site, no matter how much marketers and agencies think they need to figure out this social thing. Still, the change in attitudes about Facebook advertising by ad agencies and brands in just the last three months is striking.
33Across' stats come on the heels of another report from IDC last week indicating that Facebook ad revenue growth was steadily dropping, to a third of what it was last year. From a Los Angeles Times story:
After growing at impressive rates in the 60% range during the first three quarters of 2011, Facebook's advertising growth fell by more than half to 30% in the fourth quarter, and during the first part of 2012, the growth rate went down to 21.2%, according to a report by the IDC. The slowing growth has resulted in Facebook losing market share. After holding on to almost 14% of display advertising at the end of 2011, Facebook's share is now down to 12%.
In response to doubts about its advertising following its controversial IPO, Facebook has stepped efforts not only to prove its advertising works, but to open up or acquire new markets. In mid-June, for instance, it announced plans for an advertising exchange that would help advertisers target people on Facebook like they do on the rest of the Web.
The fact remains that with an audience nearing a billion people worldwide, including more than a Super Bowl-sized gang visiting every day and freely leaking information about their wants and desires, Facebook has a good chance of building a hugely successful 21st-century media business. The question is when. Reports like these indicate it could take longer than once-eager investors hope.
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81699f4250dee41430da58e39d0378ed
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/07/27/marketers-send-facebook-message-in-q2-show-us/
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Marketers Send Facebook Message In Q2: Show Us
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Marketers Send Facebook Message In Q2: Show Us
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Getty Images North America via @daylife)
Facebook may have disappointed investors with its first earnings report as a public company, but the results also reflect disappointment among an even more important group of constituents: marketers and agencies.
It's not that Facebook did badly on the sales front. It exceeded admittedly dampened expectations, not to mention hitting the Street's profit target. Nor do the folks who write the checks to run ads on Facebook spend much time watching FB on the stock ticker. "Whether the stock is up or down is not a big concern," says David Berkowitz, VP of emerging media at Japanese ad giant Dentsu's digital agency 360i.
What is? Results. While Facebook today trotted out plenty of stats and examples of success stories for the Sponsored Stories that it clearly views as the most effective ad it offers, the company hasn't yet managed to close the deal for many marketers and agencies. "Facebook has to do a better job of articulating the value of its advertising to the brands," says Heather Pidgeon, VP of services for iProspect, a digital agency owned by Aegis Group. "They have yet to say, 'This type of advertisement works for this type of advertiser.'"
It's a view backed up by Forrester analyst Nate Elliott in a blog post following the earnings call:
Facebook’s efforts here to date have been in generating a handful of case studies to which it can point. ‘Look! Facebook marketing worked for these 3 advertisers! That means it works!’ But marketers don’t need proof that some Facebook marketing programs work; they need proof that their Facebook marketing program works. Better yet, they need to know which of their tactics are working and which aren't, so they can learn and improve. That would require better metrics for all marketers, rather than just a handful of case studies from a few marketers.
Marketers want three things from Facebook, and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg actually voiced them on the earnings call when she said Facebook has three priorities the rest of this year: new ad products, demonstrating their ROI, and making it easier for businesses to advertise with Facebook.
Facebook must walk a delicate line here. It seems clear that advertising on social sites like Facebook will have to be different from conventional broadcast ads, so it's compelled to offer something new. That will take marketers months and years to figure out. But it also has to provide them with proof the ads work in terms and metrics they understand today.
Agency leaders such as Berkowitz and Pidgeon like a lot of what they see Facebook doing with mobile ads and the Facebook Ad Exchange. The exchange, for instance, says Pidgeon, is a "concept that advertisers are confident with."
But "there's a lot more that marketers need from Facebook," says Berkowitz. He points to the ad that appears when users log out of Facebook (rare as that may be), which is the closest thing to a traditional display ad that Facebook offers. But Berkowitz says that while no one thinks such ads will work on more prominent pages such as the home page, there should be more opportunities to use creative that agencies are accustomed to elsewhere on the Web. "They do need to listen to what marketers want," he says.
While Facebook so far looks unlikely to budge on anything that looks like it might clutter up pages or interrupt what people are doing on the site, an even bigger issue is how to measure the results of the ads it does offer. "They have a lot of work to do to prove the value of their advertising," says Berkowitz. Facebook is rapidly marshaling evidence from comScore, Nielsen, and a raft of case studies, but analytics tools are still not sufficient to satisfy marketers accustomed to metrics for established ads that can draw a straight line from ad to sales, he says.
These complaints need to be put into perspective. Nobody likes change, least of all traditionally conservative marketers and their agencies, and Facebook advertising represents a huge change. But so did Google's search ads. So did automated ad exchanges. Both are huge successes now. There's no guarantee Facebook's brand of social advertising will prove as successful as earlier tech-driven advertising, of course, but it's hard not to be intrigued by the preliminary results.
Indeed, as Kurt Abrahamson, CEO of the sharing tools provider ShareThis, notes, Facebook's challenges are "high-class problems to have." But if Facebook wants to lift itself from the cloud of doubt that still seems to hang over the company, it will be not investors but marketers it needs to convince.
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08b14542c3292ba311a41a25b6b14eda
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/07/31/brands-flock-to-google-but-facebook-twitter-still-more-active/?partner=yahootix
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Brands Flock To Google+ But Facebook, Twitter Still More Active
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Brands Flock To Google+ But Facebook, Twitter Still More Active
Number of people following brands on Google+ (Source: BrightEdge)
More and more brands are staking their claims on Google's social network, signaling that Google+ is becoming a social marketing staple along with Facebook and Twitter. But they still have far fewer fans and followers than on the two leading networks.
The latest reading on Google's biggest bet in years comes from BrightEdge, a search engine optimization firm for large brands. According to the company's new SocialShare Report, three-quarters of the top 100 brands now have Google+ pages, including new arrivals Visa, Hermes, and Wells Fargo. That's approaching the brand participation on Facebook, at 90%, and Twitter, at 80%.
The number of people following the top 100 brands grew 54% in the last two months, the report said, reaching 12.2 million. That's far lower than the 150% growth from February through May, but probably not too surprising given the absolute size.
The problem with slower growth, though, is that there are still way fewer followers of most of the top brands on Google+ vs. Facebook and Twitter. H&M, for instance, leads Google+ brand with 1.3 million followers, but that's tiny compared with its 11.6 million fans on Facebook. Even Google's third-place 968,000 followers pales next to its 10.3 million Facebook fans. Overall, Facebook has 481 million fans of the top 100 brands.
That may be a function of the still relatively early development of Google+ next to Twitter and Facebook. But it reflects a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. The lower engagement by users so far may explain why only 20% of brands with Google+ pages link to them on their own websites. But the lack of such links in turn could dampen the potential growth of new followers.
So why are most brands now on Google+ even though their fans aren't yet there in big numbers? A key reason is that merely being there appears to help brands show up more prominently in search results. BrightEdge says 30% of brands with Google+ pages show up on search results when people type in their brand name. That six times higher than in February.
The increase could reflect the growth in Google+ usage by brands and Google users, but it's also likely a result of the greater relevance Google is ascribing to social content in search results. One might wonder if there's a quid pro quo here, but while something that direct seems unlikely, it's clear that brand managers feel they must have a presence on Google+ if they want to show up more often in search results.
The bottom line: Google+ may not be a ghost town anymore, but it's still far from a thriving metropolis.
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77d757722852b62f57ac70249035e4cd
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/08/03/facebook-social-ads-whats-working-whats-not/
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Facebook Social Ads: What's Working, What's Not
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Facebook Social Ads: What's Working, What's Not
One of the biggest uncertainties about Facebook is how well its social ads work. The social network and its partners have trotted out study after study showing that people more often click on Sponsored Stories and related ads that contain a friend's name, but advertisers and especially investors are not yet universally convinced.
Today at TechCrunch's Crunchup conference in Silicon Valley, we got the skinny from two people who know as much about Facebook advertising as anyone: Greg Badros, Facebook's vice president of engineering and products and the guy in charge of advertising engineering; and longtime adman Tom Bedecarre, chairman of digital agency AKQA, now a unit of ad giant WPP. Here's what they had to say in conversation with TechCrunch's Josh Constine.
The bottom line: Both men indicated that Facebook is just at the start of the opportunity. But the guy with the checkbook really wants more kinds of ads than Facebook currently provides--and implied that the size of those checks in the future depends on getting them.
Q: How many Sponsored Stories are you showing in people's newsfeeds now?
Badros: Most of what's in the newsfeeds is organic. We just incorporate a commercial signal into the newsfeed ranking.
Q: What is the frequency of ads shown now?
Badros: It really depends on the user. We really focus on trying to optimize the experience for the user.
Q: What's the max that users can stand?
Badros: We don't know. We're going to wait and see how users behave. I'm not sure users even realize some of the content is advertising. We want to show stories that people want to see, and it can be advertisers.
Q: If users click on more ads, will they get shown more ads?
Badros: Probably yes.
Q: Are you doing enough to make it clear what's an ad?
Badros: Some advertisers ask for it to be highlighted and others think that will make them blind to them. We absolutely believe in transparency.
Q: What types of advertisers are most interested in these ads?
Bedecarre: Retail, financial services, automotive--the usual.
Q: What industries are being served well by Sponsored Stories and which are not as appropriate?
Badros: Developers (I think he meant advertisers) that publish a great story people like, they're getting engagement.
Bedecarre: We see more response to Sponsored Stories than to the right-hand ads. We're seeing higher engagement rates.
Q: What verticals aren't spending enough on Facebook?
Badros: Every vertical could be spending more on Facebook? Why should somebody not be spending a lot of their budget on Facebook? We haven't really cracked the code on retail--search works better for fulfillment there. There's a lot of opportunity for big brands in lots of verticals.
Bedecarre: WPP has announced that they're upping the share they spend on Facebook, from $200 million to $400 million, but of course that's still way less than 1%.
Q: What about app developers--Facebook could be the last click on apps, right?
Badros: Just a couple weeks ago we just started testing Sponsored Results, where they can place ads on the type-ahead when you search on Facebook.
Q: What percentage of the total ad spend on Facebook is coming through the API or managed services or self-service?
Badros: A good portion comes through the API, though a lot of it gets mingled among the various services.
Q: Are you losing a lot of money through your APIs to your partners?
Badros: Facebook is a new kind of advertising that requires a lot of handholding especially through this stage where advertisers are trying to figure out how it works. Partners are an important part of helping us do that.
Bedecarre: People here live in a bubble where Facebook looks like everything. But Facebook is just a part of the advertising opportunity, so working with agency trading desks and ad exchanges will help it get more spend.
Q: I used to run Facebook advertising at my last company, and it was hell. What are you doing to make it easier for small businesses?
Badros: One, we're focusing on helping the advertiser tell us what their goals are, and then optimizing for that. The other really significant thing that has worked very well for us, especially for small businesses with a page, is our Page Post product. It makes it easier for business to turn a page post into a Sponsored Stories. That's starting to work really, really well.
Bedecarre: You can give them a lot of credit for innovation, but large advertisers and agencies like consistency and continuity. Sometimes the development group here creates things too fast for advertisers to deal with. I hear a lot of complaints about that. They want less change. They also want more open access to the data.
Q: Some companies in the Facebook Exchange are investing a lot in it, hoping it's the next big thing on Facebook. Are they right?
Badros: This is something that we've seen matters to people on other platforms. We can bring more users to an exchange than any other platform.
Q: How did the test of "related ads" do last year?
Badros: We're always trying things. That's sort of retargeting things that happened in an earlier Facebook session. We see an opportunity in retargeting generally.
Q: Do you need to do commerce and transactions in addition to advertising to fulfill investor expectations?
Badros: There's no reason to only have one horse in your stable. Ads is going to remain a very, very important one. It's an enormous opportunity for us. So we've just begun.
Q (from audience): Tom, what do advertisers really want to see from Facebook?
Bedecarre: Martin Sorrell is unconvinced it's an advertising medium. So things like the exchange at the lower end of the purchase funnel are things they'd like to see.
People want to see mobile get traction.
Q: Are brands really on board with Facebook's idea that its advertising is really different, requiring engagement?
Bedecarre: Our brands, like Nike or Gap, are doing things that are more engaging. Advertisers are accustomed to having more elbow room. So the righthand column is very restrictive with what creative people want to do.
Q: What's the value of the logout screen ads?
Badros: We were surprising how many people were logging out--like from public libraries and Internet cafes. Those ad units provide much more creative freedom for advertisers. When somebody does log out, picture an Internet cafe, and that's a banner ad showing to everyone.
Bedecarre: That's a good example of thinking outside the box. I'm just hoping that over time, it's not just on the logout screen. There's going to be opportunities to do things that are more creative like that.
Q: What are you looking for in terms of data from Facebook?
Bedecarre: We want to be able to use the data off Facebook.
Q: Tom, are a lot of advertisers still testing the waters or really shifting budgets to mobile, social, etc.?
Bedecarre: There's a lot of data showing digital ad spending is growing fast. But a lot of big brands are kind of addicted to television advertising and video. It's easier for them to put an ad on YouTube.
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ca1e5bf4842cd810205d6485b0be092d
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/08/30/poof-1-billion-slashed-from-2012-facebook-revenue-forecast/
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Poof! $1 Billion Slashed From 2012 Facebook Revenue Forecast
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Poof! $1 Billion Slashed From 2012 Facebook Revenue Forecast
Facebook's revenues, particularly from advertising, won't grow as fast as expected this year, according to a revised forecast from market researcher eMarketer.
EMarketer today said the No. 1 social network will just break $5 billion in revenues this year, with $4.2 billion coming from advertising and the rest from payments and other revenues. That's down $1 billion from the research firm's estimate from last February, several months before Facebook's initial public offering in early May. Even so, Facebook's ad revenues are still forecast to jump 34% this year from a year ago, and rise 29% next year.
The key reason for the change actually does not reflect a key concern of investors: mobile advertising. [Corrected; I initially misread the release to say mobile was a key factor.] Although Facebook has been slow to roll out advertising on mobile devices, eMarketer had not factored that into previous forecasts either. Instead, the estimate cut reflects growing concerns about the effectiveness and measurability of Facebook ads.
The revenue estimate cut isn't entirely a surprise. Facebook reported less-than-expected revenue growth in its first and second quarters this year. And eMarketer's original forecast was higher than that of many other analysts, whose recent estimates came in at around $5 billion.
Still, the new forecast could add to investor worries that Facebook's growth is stalling as its advertising sales, especially on mobile devices, come up short. In a market that was down about 1% today, Facebook's shares fell a penny, to $19.09. That's about half their IPO level.
“Major marketers are still questioning the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook, and they are concerned that their ability to measure results is underdeveloped,” eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in the release. “Facebook is working on addressing these concerns, but it must move even more quickly.”
Lately Facebook has been launching a flurry of new ad formats. It also recently introduced an ad exchange that holds promise to juice revenues by making ad buys more automated. And in an attempt to counter bad publicity such as General Motors' pullback of Facebook ads just before its IPO, Facebook has released a series of reports and case studies showing how marketers have gotten returns from Facebook advertising.
EMarketer says Facebook's Marketplace ads that appear on the right side of the page are effective, and that Facebook is likely to provide similarly automated ad buying for so-called premium ad formats such as Sponsored Stories, which appear to perform better because they contain the implied endorsement of people's friends.
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8969e2bda4c8ab66006030376de1aa24
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/11/05/uh-oh-survey-says-most-people-find-facebook-and-twitter-ads-misleading/
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Uh-Oh--Survey Says Most People Find Facebook And Twitter Ads Misleading
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Uh-Oh--Survey Says Most People Find Facebook And Twitter Ads Misleading
To hear Silicon Valley and nouveau ad-tech types tell it, traditional advertising sucks. The best way to attract people's attention and engage them more fully is to create ad formats that more closely resemble the activities people are already doing on a site--in other words, to make ads look less like ads.
That's the idea behind so-called "native" ads such as Facebook's Sponsored Stories and Twitter's Promoted Tweets. Although various studies seem to indicate these ads are indeed more effective than standard banner ads--a low bar, it must be said--a new survey released today indicates that a lot of consumers don't trust native ads. According to the survey by app advertising firm MediaBrix and Harris Interactive:
* 45% found Twitter promoted tweets misleading.
* 57% found Facebook sponsored stories misleading.
* 86% found sponsored video ads that appear to be content misleading.
The survey also found that a large majority of people who have seen Twitter Promoted Tweets in the past 12 months said they hurt or had no impact on their perception of the brand advertised. Some 72% said the same thing about Facebook's Sponsored Stories. And 85% found sponsored video ads didn't leave them with warm feelings. "While anyone pushing the native ad agenda or otherwise would agree that we need to provide user experiences that are not jarring or disruptive, we also need to ensure that we are direct and honest with our consumers about when they are being marketed to," MediaBrix CEO Ari Brandt said. "Some formats achieve this better than others."
Mind some caveats about this research. For one, it doesn't compare native ads to banner ads, so there's no telling whether trust in banner ads is any better than these native ads. Also, what people say they feel about ads and brands may have little to do with the ads' effectiveness. And MediaBrix has a dog in this hunt, since it offers its own kinds of ad formats for social and mobile apps.
Still, it's a splash of cold water on a trend that some very high-profile companies are counting on to become the next Google. And it's a lesson that marketers apparently constantly need to be reminded about: Don't try to fool your customers, because it can destroy trust in your brand.
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e805211ccc7c9edc230ccb459dac638d
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/11/27/will-google-dodge-an-ftc-antitrust-bullet/
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Will Google Dodge An FTC Antitrust Bullet?
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Will Google Dodge An FTC Antitrust Bullet?
The Federal Trade Commission's antitrust investigation of Google is about to come to a head, by most accounts. But it's a complex case touching on several aspects of antitrust law and whether Google's search and other activities violate any of them, and the implications for Google, its investors, and Internet users could be huge.
Two attorneys intimately aware of the case provided contrasting views at a webinar this morning conducted by the investment firm International Strategy & Investment and its senior managing director Bill Whyman. Gary Reback is an antitrust lawyer most famous for representing Netscape in its antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s. He now represents several vertical-search companies, such as NexTag, that have complained about Google practices. Geoffrey Manne is a lecturer in law at Lewis & Clark Law School and executive director of the International Center for Law & Economics,which receives financial support from Google and other companies. He has written extensively about his belief that there is no strong antitrust case against Google.
The main takeaway: Despite a Bloomberg story last week that said the FTC was wavering and unlikely to attack Google's core search business--and another today that repeats that assertion--there's no agreement by the two sides on what the FTC will end up doing. Reback seemed to acknowledge that Google might find a way to maneuver politically around the FTC to avoid a full-scale assault on the way it conducts its search business. But he also noted that the European Union is closely watching the outcome and may act on its own if the FTC does nothing more than a settlement on the more minor issues.
One key point on timing: Press reports say there's a Dec. 3 meeting between FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz & EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia. What's more, Leibowitz is expected to leave for private practice around the end of the year, so that could affect the case one way or another. And if it means anything, Bloomberg says Google CEO Larry Page met with the FTC today.
In Forbes contributor coverage, at least, most of the opinion sways against the FTC taking decisive action to limit Google's activities because the case could be weak. (Disclosure of sorts: As I tweeted a few days ago, I remain skeptical of the specific antitrust claims of vertical-search companies such as NexTag, agreeing with search guru Danny Sullivan's views about the search business, in particular that Google's efforts to offer similar search services should not be limited. But I recognize that antitrust law is open to wide interpretation, so it's important to provide contrasting perspectives like these so we know what's at stake.)
Whyman noted that Google's regulatory risk is rising, almost inevitably as it has grown. Here's ISI's summary of the key issues:
• Has GOOG anti-competitively favored its own vertical services in its search results (e.g. unfairly ranked related Google services higher than its competitors, or anti-competitively discriminated in pricing)? • Has GOOG anti-competitively used exclusive agreements with web publishers to de facto require them to use GOOG for all or most of their search advertisements, shutting out competing providers? • Has GOOG anti-competitively used contractual restrictions on data about ad campaigns making it difficult to compare/use other rival services? • Has GOOG anti-competitively used content from other web sites or search services (e.g. reviews) in its own services? • Has GOOG anti-competitively used patents (acquired from Motorola) in violation of “FRAND” obligations: “Fair, Reasonable & Non-Discriminatory” licensing.
These issues are coming to a head, Whyman noted, as the FTC is expected to press charges or reach a settlement by year-end. Most recently, it appears that a settlement, and in fact one that may leave Google's core search business relatively untouched, is more likely--though Reback believes that appearance is a result of Google spin and that a serious antitrust case on Google search remains very much alive.
First up on the webinar was Reback, laying the groundwork for his case against Google. All of these kinds of claims remain viable and under investigation, he said. And in Europe, privacy concerns are also under the microscope.
Reback sees a couple of key issues: Starting in about 2005, he claims, Google began to penalize competitors in terms of search results. It has always penalized spam sites, he said, but in 2005, Google started penalizing specialty-search results for no other reason except that they're competitors. Starting in 2007, Google began to raise its own search results in specialty search categories, Reback said, putting them at or near the top of search results.
The FTC could proceed several ways, he said, but it will probably start with the claim of deception--that Google said it was treating all results fairly, and it wasn't. The effect on Google long-term may not be as great that way. But if it then extends that to the idea that Google was trying to extend its search monopoly, that could have a greater effect.
So how likely is a lawsuit and remedy that would affect Google's profits? He thinks there is a majority within the FTC who view Google's conduct as extremely problematic and want to take action against it. That doesn't mean they all will, or recommend the same remedies.
Leibowitz (and most of the commissioners) would rather do a settlement if possible, but it's not clear that Leibowitz can make that happen. It doesn't seem likely by year-end at this point, Reback said. In Europe, he said, authorities seem to be ready to go at the flip of a switch, but they may want the cover of an FTC action.
If something happens, there's going to be a lot of spin coming your way, Reback told the online audience of investors. When the Microsoft ruling came down, the stock dropped 20% that day and 20% later too.
Manne made his case that there isn't much of a case there. In order to win a Section 2 case, he said, the commission has to be confident that there's a market in which Google is a dominant player, that it has caused harm in this market, such as to the necessary inputs to the businesses of competitors. It's not enough for the FTC to demonstrate that NexTag has seen a reduction in its traffic from Google; it has to show foreclosure, that is, that it prevented NexTag from getting traction in the business at all. The FTC also has to demonstrate harm to consumers, he said. And it has to show that there are significant barriers to entry in the business.
Manne thinks the foreclosure argument is very difficult to maintain in terms of the alleged search bias. Signals in the press presumably being leaked from the FTC, he said, indicate that the FTC doesn't feel it has a search claim, either from vertical-search firms or Microsoft with Bing. So he thinks that case seems unlikely.
As to the exclusivity argument, it revolves around the AdWords API and AdWords for Search. The idea is that advertisers should be able to advertise on both Google and other search engines at the same time--in particular, whether third parties (like NexTag, presumably) allowed to do this, since individual advertisers already can advertise as they wish on any search engine.
Then there's the question of scraping, where Google takes scraps of content from other sites, such as review sites, and runs them in its own results.
And on patents, there's a separate but related investigation.
Manne's sense is that the FTC has signaled that the search issues will be nonexistent. So the issues it is more likely to address are the AdWords API and scraping issues.
As for the standards-essential patents, he said, the FTC probably won't address that directly either. If the FTC were to insist on Google not to employ injunctions, I don't see Google agreeing to that, Manne said, but he doesn't see the FTC pursuing that either.
So these latter issues (AdWords API, AdWords for Search, scraping, and standards-essential patents) are less prominent and invasive. Thus there's a much greater likelihood of a settlement that doesn't entail a remedy that involves ongoing monitoring of Google's algorithm. Microsoft is the only company concerned about the AdWords API, so that's not a huge issue. And on the AdWords for Search, that's also a limited number of companies involved as well.
On the scraping issue, he said, it's really a copyright issue, and it's not clear the FTC wants to weigh in on a copyright issue. And using snippets is an issue that gets to the basic functionality of Google search, he argued, and that has already been resolved in previous court cases. "We're really looking at some sort of settlement," he said. "I think search issues are off the table.
Finally, on the Section 5 issue (a separate body of antitrust law), there is an argument that the FTC could bring a pure antitrust case, but, he said, "I think it's not so clear the FTC can win such a case." It would be an extension of the FTC's power, and he said courts have been unreceptive to this. It would put every company in the tech space at great peril, he thinks, but he also believes it's an unlikely outcome.
Whyman asked Reback if search is indeed off the table. Reback said that's what Google, not the FTC, is leaking, designed to make you think search is off the table. The FTC, at least four of the commissioners, he said, are very concerned about search. So it's not off the table.
Manne said there needs to be foreclosure to make a Section 2 case. That's just not true, Reback argued. With Netscape, there was no foreclosure--they distributed millions of browsers--but Microsoft denied its competitor the most efficient way to market, and that's exactly what Google is doing here, he said. Google changed its practice of claiming that it was sending searchers only to the best sites, he added, because it was concerned about competition from these other search services.
So Reback said he thinks the case will boil down to a political matter--can Google maneuver around the FTC? He also thinks the FTC will go ahead with a case even if it has only three votes to do it.
A listener asked: How will the FTC address the contrasting notions of intent to limit competition on Google's part vs. the idea that consumers want answers, not just Web links? Reback said it's pretty straightforward that Google claimed it's providing objective, non-manipulated search results, and it's not doing that. They say they're doing one thing, he said, and in fact they're doing something else.
The problem with trying to win a deception case, Manne responded, is that the deception has to revolve around material statements that are misleading. It may be the case that Google has said what Gary claims, but it's debatable whether those claims, such as a graduate thesis by Google's founders, are material. And if it is a deception case, the remedies are to stop saying the deceptive things, he said. There's no change in underlying conduct required.
Also, favoring one's own products is what every vertically integrated firm does, he noted, so in and of itself, that's not a problem. And it happens far more frequently on Bing than on Google, he pointed out. It's an extraordinarily strong indication that it is not in fact a competitive problem. It's really a nonstarter.
Manne also pushed back on Reback's argument, saying you actually do have to demonstrate foreclosure. There's a question of whether NexTag is even a competitor of Google in first place, he added, but in any case, NexTag has other means to reach competitive scale. So he doesn't think they can actually win such a case.
Another question: How is the pain to competitors vs. the benefits to consumers balanced? Reback said the seminal case on this is the Microsoft antitrust case. It's not necessary for regulators to show a monetary overcharge to consumers, he said. The antitrust injury was shown by diminished competition--that automatically damages consumers and damages innovation.
Manne argued that the facts are extremely different here. In Microsoft's case, the allegation was that competitors couldn't reach viable scale to compete in this market because of the barriers to entry, in particular network effects. But here, he said, there are plenty of other avenues to access to consumers: Microsoft has great ability to get access to consumers, so the harm to competition that would amount to harm to consumers simply isn't present. Nor is there much harm, if any, to competitors, he said. We know that Bing is continually doing better, he said. Its joining with Yahoo has exacerbated that considerably. Kayak, Expedia, and NexTag are doing extremely well.
What are the broader consequences for the industry here? Reback isn't sure there actually are broader consequences. Other tech companies don't have much to worry about from this case, he said. "I don't think there's going to be a case against Facebook or anybody else."
Manne thinks there could be a much bigger consequence if the FTC actually files suit. If the FTC can expand its powers under Section 5, he said, it will be doing so under a statute that has none of the limitations of the last 40 years circumscribing the ability of regulators to overreach. The biggest issue is indications that we're going to see a settlement vs. litigation, he said. That will mean that the most divisive issues are not on the table. And that means it won't be damaging to Google and the rest of the tech industry. The leaks are not coming from Google , he added.
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8bd0ae3659edb5aa5f06942512946441
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/12/28/peering-over-fiscal-cliff-marketers-cut-global-ad-spending/
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Peering Over Fiscal Cliff, Marketers Cut Global Ad Spending
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Peering Over Fiscal Cliff, Marketers Cut Global Ad Spending
Global ad spending is slowing down, prompting a prominent market researcher to cut its estimate of growth this year. eMarketer says ad revenues worldwide will rise 5.4% this year, to $519 billion, down from its 6.8% growth estimate seven months ago.
The culprit, not surprisingly: worries about the economy. No doubt the last couple of months of concern over the U.S. going over the fiscal cliff, thereby potentially triggering a recession, has marketers spooked about committing too much when it looks like consumer spending could follow national finances off the cliff.
That 5.4% increase is still a big improvement over 2011's 3.6% growth, though partly thanks to the Olympics and the election. And eMarketer, whose forecasts are based on analysis of economic conditions and other researchers' estimates, reckons growth will be fairly steady at about 5% through 2016.
What's more, online ad spending, not specifically addressed in this report, is expected to grow much faster. In particular, mobile ad spending, while still relatively small, will grow like crazy--nearly tripling this year, to $4 billion in the U.S. thanks to surging "native" ads from Facebook and Twitter.
But slower-than-expected ad spending could have ripple effects on a wide swath of companies depending on a strong advertising market, from Google and Facebook to hundreds of startups.
And it gets even worse for the many companies chiefly dependent on ad spending in North America, the world's biggest market. Here, eMarketer expects growth of 4.9% this year, dropping precipitously to 3.5% next year and bumping up and down around that rate for several more years.
Propping up growth are surging ad markets in China, India, Indonesia, South America, and even Russia.
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03e12a8d093bdaa7f1c74012680f91cd
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/01/29/once-controversial-googles-product-listing-ads-now-a-big-hit/
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Once Controversial, Google's Product Listing Ads Now A Big Hit
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Once Controversial, Google's Product Listing Ads Now A Big Hit
Google Product Listing Ads
When Google revamped its shopping service last May, it said it would begin charging merchants to list their products. These Product Listing Ads, as they're called, set off a firestorm of controversy because they represented the first time Google had eliminated a search service that had free listings and made it paid-only.
Although Google posed the move as a way to improve the quality of listings, merchants squawked that this would raise their costs to appear in shopping search results. But even more broadly, the move raised doubts in some people's minds about whether Google's search engine could still be seen as fair and impartial if its results were affected by who paid it for shopping listings.
Well, so much for that issue. Not that it has gone away completely, but by several accounts, Product Listing Ads are a big hit with both advertisers and consumers. A study released this morning by ad management service Marin Software indicates that the share of clicks PLAs got as a portion of overall search ad clicks last year more than tripled. They were still a single-digit percentage of text search ad clicks, about 6%, but Google only rolled them out widely in October.
Marin also says that whether merchants wanted to pay or not, they did--increasing their investments in the ads sevenfold, to 3% of their search ad spend as the holiday shopping season peaked. Some retailers spent up to 30% of their search budgets on PLAs, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars overall. The ads also had a higher click-through rate and a lower average cost than text search ads, though Marin doesn't get specific about those measures. "It appears Google's bet has paid off," says Matt Lawson, Marin's VP of marketing. "This is a piece of how Google is competing with Amazon, which is becoming a commerce search engine."
This isn't the first report to document the success of Product Listing Ads. Adobe also said recently that by the peak of the holiday shopping season, in mid-December, PLAs accounted for 17% of all ad spending on Google. And search marketing firm RKG said PLAs accounted for 28% of non-brand paid search clicks in the fourth quarter.
Apparent success doesn't make the ads less controversial, at least among search engine watchers like Danny Sullivan. It just looks like that controversy isn't enough to keep merchants from using them to make more money.
Here's an infographic from Marin with some background and stats:
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89bac7aa8d5d3991374496ec92b5d004
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/01/30/by-the-numbers-everything-you-want-to-know-about-how-facebook-ads-fared-in-q4/
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By The Numbers: Everything You Want To Know About How Facebook Ads Fared In Q4
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By The Numbers: Everything You Want To Know About How Facebook Ads Fared In Q4
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer (Image: Getty Images via @daylife)
During Facebook's analyst conference call to discuss its better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings, Facebook revealed some new insights into how well its advertising system is working. I couldn't catch all the details, but Facebook has provided a summary of ad-related stats announced by Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
Understand that all these figures are directly from Facebook, not vetted by any reporting and obviously selected to present Facebook's advertising efforts in the best possible light. But assuming they are accurate, at least--and marketer mileage certainly will vary widely--they still shed some light on how this still new method of marketing is evolving.
Before getting to those numbers, though, it's worth asking what's behind the big jump in Facebook's ad business. Ad revenue rose 41% from a year ago, 23% of it from mobile advertising, up from 14% in the third quarter.
The reason is actually pretty basic, says Jared Belsky, executive VP at digital ad agency 360i. Yes, everyone, including Facebook, likes to talk about the appeal of social ads, the relevance of "native" ad formats like Sponsored Stories and news feed ads, and so on. But really, advertisers mainly like the fact that through Facebook, they can reach an entirely new audience that doesn't simply duplicate the reach of every Web ad network out there, which all are offering access to the very same people, or at least the very same consumer profiles.
In other words, Facebook offers a greenfield of new audiences, with an overall reach large enough that they can target narrowly and still reach millions of people. And with the Facebook ad exchange, they can reach them using their own data on consumers as well. Belsky says they're also starting to find that Facebook ads do work--especially with a new conversion tracking tool from Facebook that helps them determine if a Facebook ad led to a sale, a sales lead, or another desired action. Facebook's own analytics are getting better, he says, enabling marketers to track the impact of their Facebook ad spend.
Apropos of that, here are those stats from Facebook:
For brand marketers, Facebook is now working with every one of the Ad Age Global 100 advertisers. Wal-mart used this target block over the Thanksgiving weekend to deliver 50 million mobile ads to their existing and potential customers. Michael Kors used Facebook to launch a new line of sneakers. Many of the sneakers sold out online and in stores, and they achieved a 16-point increase in awareness of the new sneaker among the 36 million people that the campaign reached on Facebook. That’s the equivalent of 5.8 million new people in the brand’s target audience who are now aware of the new line of shoes. For direct marketers, tools including Offers, Custom Audiences and FBX are fueling growth. Nearly 42 million unique users are claiming an Offer. Costs per redemption compare favorably to those from email, newspaper, paid search, and display media based on data from the Direct Marketing Association. JackThreads, an online shopping site for men, used Custom Audiences to target specific segments of its customer database and target them with ads for products in categories the company knew were most relevant to them such as sneakers. As a result, the company achieved a 30% lower cost per acquisition than other platforms and saw a 6x return on advertising spend. And despite only becoming available to all marketers in September, by December, FBX served nearly one billion impressions daily and supported over 1,300 advertisers each day. Revenue from local businesses was particularly strong in the fourth quarter: local business Pages that advertise on Facebook nearly doubled since the beginning of 2012, fueled by Promoted Posts, which makes it easier for businesses to create and purchase ads directly from their Facebook Page. Almost 500,000 Pages have used Promoted Posts. About 30% of those are new advertisers to Facebook and more than 70% have become repeat customers. Developers are seeing success with mobile app install ads, launched in October and already being used by 20% of the top 100 grossing iOS apps to accelerate growth. According to research conducted by comScore in December, Facebook is the top driver of awareness of new mobile app downloads and, among people who learn about new apps on Facebook, 48% click directly from the Facebook app to download new mobile apps. A new game, Car Town Streets broke into the Top 10 Games list on iOS in many countries while achieving a 40% lower cost per installation compared to their other advertising with mobile app install ads.
Sandberg also provided numbers on the effectiveness of Facebook's advertising:
Research from Aggregate Knowledge showed that Facebook is an increasingly powerful tool to help marketers reach more people and drive sales. In a study of fourth quarter marketing campaigns, they found that media plans that included Facebook reached people who would not have seen the campaigns otherwise. In fact, 45% of those reached were reached exclusively through Facebook. The study also found that Facebook had a 68% lower cost per acquisition and drove 24% more new sales than other online channels. Facebook built a deep relationship with PepsiCo, working with its Lay's brand to drive sales significantly ahead of plan and a 5x return on advertising spend for their "Do Us A Flavor" campaign on Facebook. 65% of Facebook’s advertisers are now using ads in news feed, which run on both desktop and mobile, up from 50% at the end of the third quarter. Measurement work with Datalogix has shown that ads in news feed also drive more than 8x the incremental offline sales than ads on the right hand side.
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ecc81110f8c5a23da5a2f0e7011706be
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/05/06/adobe-halts-new-software-releases-in-big-shift-to-the-cloud/
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Adobe Halts New Software Releases In Big Shift To The Cloud
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Adobe Halts New Software Releases In Big Shift To The Cloud
Gallery: Adobe's New 280,000 Sq. Foot Campus in Utah 17 images View gallery
With iconic brands like Photoshop and Illustrator used almost universally by artists, photographers, and creators of websites, games, advertising, and other digital media, Adobe probably still looks to many people like a classic traditional software company. Today, it's trying to hammer some of the last few nails into that coffin.
This morning at its annual MAX conference in Los Angeles, the keynote of which is being streamed online, Adobe said it will no longer release new versions of its $1,300 Creative Suite packaged desktop design software. Although it will continue to sell and support its latest version, all its new features will go into its Creative Cloud, the online suite of all its products it introduced a year ago. The apps will be branded "CC" rather than "CS."
It's a big shift for Adobe and especially its longtime customers. The move is intended to speed the pace of innovation at Adobe, replacing one-year product cycles with continual updates online. It also will help Adobe and its customers connect the more traditional content creation and enhancement tools like Photoshop and Illustrator with the company's Marketing Cloud, its set of online marketing software and services. "This gives us the freedom to think differently and help us innovate more quickly," David Wadhwani, Adobe's senior vice president and general manager of digital media, said in an interview. "It's a much more modern business model."
Not least, Adobe hopes the subscription model, with no software to buy or support in-house, will attract a broader set of customers, including small businesses. "It changes the cost of entry," says Wadhwani. "We're starting to see penetration into these customer bases."
Adobe says it has amassed some 500,000 paying Creative Cloud customers, with 1.5 million more non-paid users. But the company acknowledged that it won't be easy or quick for many customers to move to the cloud. "There are going to be some customers who aren't ready for this," says Scott Morris, a senior marketing manager for Creative Cloud.
Morris reckons that it will take at least a couple of years for most to move, though he added that Adobe went through a similar transition 10 years ago when it offered the Creative Suite rather than just individual programs. "We proved to them over time that it was better for them to get software that way," he says. But as you can see from some comments below, as well as elsewhere, not everyone is thrilled.
Pricing varies by type of customer but starts at $49.99 a month per person for individuals. Existing Creative Suite customers, students, and teachers will get a discount to $29.99 a month.
To sweeten the somewhat enforced move to the cloud, Adobe also is introducing a major update to Creative Cloud, available next month. New features, which Adobe says number in the hundreds, range from the ability to sync settings and fonts among various computers to camera shake reduction in Photoshop CC to integration of its online creative community, Behance, into Creative Cloud.
Adobe has made a "thorough transformation of its desktop software into a set of cloud services," says Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC. He says such transitions are rare but that Adobe seems to have made a strong start. "Adobe's clients have definitely jumped on Creative Cloud, perhaps even faster than the fastest projections," he says. "Adobe's transition to cloud services really sets the benchmark for traditional software vendors wanting to move to the cloud."
The move to the cloud won't be complete, and not just because it will take awhile for existing customers to move over. Government agencies and schools that are limited by rules or laws on how much they can use cloud services will continue to download desktop apps. Also, to be clear, even the Creative Cloud involves downloading software onto desktops or laptops simply because bandwidth limitations would limit performance too much on complex programs and rich media files.
Still, investors aren't complaining about the progress at Adobe, which today affirmed its second-quarter and 2013 targets. Its shares have risen steadily since last November, topping $47 a share to reach their highest point since late 2007. It's down a fraction in today's trading.
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da23b38ebc363c7242c726a465cc69d7
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/05/23/live-the-top-10-future-tech-trends-from-5-top-venture-capitalists/
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The Top 10 Future Tech Trends From 5 Top Venture Capitalists
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The Top 10 Future Tech Trends From 5 Top Venture Capitalists
The only thing people in Silicon Valley like to do more than talk about the future of tech is to invent it. Tonight they settled for the second-best thing, in the form of the popular Top 10 Tech Trends dinner.
Hosted by the Churchill Club, which holds speaking events featuring top tech folks every year, this year's event, the 15th annual, featured an all-venture capitalist panel. That figures, since the event was partially tied to the annual Midas List that just came out from co-sponsor Forbes.
On the panel: David Cowan, a partner with Bessemer Venture Partners; Venky Ganesan, managing director at Menlo Ventures; Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia Capital; and George Zachary, a general partner with Charles River Ventures. The moderators are Forbes Media President and CEO Mike Perlis and Forbes Managing Editor Bruce Upbin.
The panel, which you may be able to watch live if you're not one of the several hundred in attendance, starts at 7 p.m. Pacific at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. In previous years, the audience held up red and green cards supplemented by electronic voting devices to indicate what they think of each trend--alas, no more--but last year they used a Twitter-based polling system. This year, it's a service called Poll Everywhere, at pollev.com, that audience members accesses on their cell phones. Glad to see that panel members still have red-green ping-pong paddles they hold up. I'll post highlights as they happen.
Technically, the trends are supposed to be ones that aren't obvious yet but will be explosive within five years--tough criteria. Honestly, some of these trends have been explored before, including at previous tech trends events. But often they take a decade to develop, so it would be more concerning, perhaps, if they showed up only once. Anyway, here goes....
1) EyePhones Replace iPhones: Eyewear computers will record our lives, says Cowan. The impact of graphical computing is minor compared with how facial computing will impact our lives. Ha, a photo of Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard as a Borg. Anyway, these eyewear computers will make iPhones obsolete. He's not talking about just Google Glass, but more of an immersive experience. But still in four adorable colors, he adds.
We'll be able to log our lives and summon up conversations from the past, or know what it's like to be in the space station. We'll be able to double-click on things we see to interact with them or buy them. Abroad, the signs will be in English for us, and speech will be subtitled. A new generation of games will emerge that are more immersive than any so far.
Two reds, and two greens. Ganesan says we'll get too distracted and the biggest premium will be undivided attention. Jurvetson thinks it won't replace other devices and will be relegated to niches like military or geeks. There are some killer apps, though, like augmented info on people as you meet them. Lin says they could be useful even in, say, a Zappos warehouse, so workers know what to pick off a shelf while leaving their hands free. But it would be better as a contact lens.
About 60% of the audience doesn't think this will happen.
2) The "Right Now" Economy: Ganesan says the proliferation of a ubiquitous mobile devices, consumer web services, the ability to get feedback from the crowd, and analytics for the big data that results means consumers are moving from a "plan ahead" economy to a "right now" economy. Thus we see the rapid rise of companies such as Twitter, Waze, Uber, and Skout. For better or worse.
Twitter has faster news than most news services, he says. Waze has real-time traffic. You can get an immediate ride via Uber. And Skout? Instant hookup, theoretically. Three green and one red paddle. Zachary says it's just human nature to want what you want immediately. It's the obvious thing. Maybe, Ganesan says, but you can do all this only now. Red-paddle Jurvetson says he actually agrees with the trend but thinks it's already too obvious--the entire history of the Internet is instant info and purchases. Ganesan argues that the trend really is about to reach critical mass with, well, the masses.
The audience is split, a few more disagreeing than agreeing.
3) Deux Ex Machina: [Actually, I think it should be Deus Ex Machina.] Machine learning innervates the tech frontier. (Innervate means to add intelligence to things that weren't before, Jurvetson says. OK.) He says machine learning will underly a lot of innovations like it does Siri, driverless cars, and Google Now today. Big data and sensors everywhere are only useful if we have machine learning to make it meaningful. Humanoid robots entering the workplace. Real-time translation services. Just about anything you hear from Google that's new involves machine learning.
Paddles: two green, two red. Cowan, a red, whips out his iPhone and asks Siri, "Will machine learning be important in the next five years?" The answer: "Would you like me to search the Web for that?" In other words, no. For things to actually work, he says, you need human curation of the algorithms. And for these systems to get smart, it takes as long as for a human. We won't see a Moore's Law for acceleration of the smartness of these algorithms. Ganesan, who waved a green paddle, thinks the glut of data will nearly mandate the need for machine intelligence. It's not obvious yet but likely to happen faster than we think. Look at what IBM Watson is doing in medicine.
Lin says you won't trust a black box to trust things about your life. (Well, what about the Magic Eight-Ball. OK, it's a ball, not a box.) A human had to teach a car how to drive. Jurvetson responds that that's the whole point of machine learning--it gets taught and then does the job more consistently--he'd rather have a driverless car than most people he has driven with.
Audience: Around 75% agree (as do I).
4) The Individual Revolution: Technology has given us unprecedented tools to get work done individually that once required large organizations, Lin says. Again, half red, half green. Zachary, a green paddle, says a lot of companies he sees are focused on human potential. Jurvetson, a red, isn't sure what examples he's thinking of. Neither am I, honestly. Lin says the ubiquity of the mobile phone is what's empowering this. All these services enable a much faster response. Ganesan, who agrees with Lin, says all these productivity tools enable individuals to be a much bigger business presence.
Cowan, the other red paddle, says there's an illusion that we should all be our own bosses. There's a downside to the incubators who promote this. The most worthy ventures I see require teams to pursue. The audience isn't so sure either--two-thirds disagree.
5) The U.S. Is The Supreme Cyber Security Force: Citizens will accept complete observation by the state, says Zachary. Why? The forces of hate will never subside. People will create a drone with 3D printing and bomb a building. Then the government will crack down and analyze every cell phone call. Shades of Minority Report, or the Bourne movies. This will lead to other countries to develop technologies to counter this, creating cyber-wars. Once again, panelists split in half.
Ganesan, who disagrees, says the long arc of humanity is toward a more progressive, humanistic level--in actuality, we're safer today than we ever have been in history. It's much harder to demonize people and kill them when there are more social connections online. The fear is much greater because of the Right Now Economy, counters Cowan. Jurvetson says the amount of effort it takes to unleash mass destruction continues to drop fast, thus his green paddle--though he thinks a police state won't work. Lin, a red, says he just believes in the good of human beings, especially as people know more about everyone else through all the information we will have at our fingertips.
Sixty percent say a police state is coming. Great.
6) Cyber Warfare Becomes A Good Thing. Cyber missions are instant, effective, relatively free, and nonlethal, says Cowan. This will completely disrupt the defense industry. Companies usually wish hacking will go away, but it won't. There's a great opportunity for startups to handle these threats. Hackers will be heroes, in other words. Two reds, two greens again.
Ganesan, a red, isn't sure he wants to enable cyberwarfare vigilantes. Jurvetson doesn't think it would be good to concentrate power in opaque organizations. Nearly 60% of the audience agrees.
7) Certifications, Not Diplomas: The emergence of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other online lifelong learning educational sites such as Khan Academy, Coursera, and Udacity means the future will be defined not by where you went to school but rather by what you know, says Ganesan. Hasn't this really always been the case, at least by your 30s? The educational world is becoming flat, he said. Or to put it more plainly, it won't be what you studied that's important, but what you shipped. Well, if you're an engineer or an entrepreneur.
Two greens, two reds, yet again. Lin, mostly a red, thinks diplomas are still a signal we will use to assess people. Also, the good schools are already thinking of how they need to change to survive in this environment. Jurvetson, a green, says in the next five years there will be more accurate ways and signals to assess people globally on their skills than diplomas. Cowan, a red, says MOOCs are great for efficiently distributing information, but thinking outside the box and creatively happens better at universities where you're not just an IP address.
Audience is split in half. Cowan adds: Your kid gets accepted into Stanford--are you going to say, no no, I'd rather she do MOOCs. No.
8) Erasing The digital divide Ironically Accelerates The Rich-Poor Gap. Winner-take-all network effects will rule, says Jurvetson. He says he's a technology enthusiast but worries info technologies will exacerbate the gap, particularly in regional areas that used to be protected from global competition. Two billion people coming online in the next couple years will produce a wealth of cheap talent. Paddles: Yet another even split.
Cowan agrees with most of this, but he doesn't think people who get off the technology bandwagon never catch up. He thinks it's a temporary problem, because everyone will be part of the info economy. Jurvetson: Think about big parts of the world that reject science and modernity. Cowan writes them off, hmm. I'm not sure the fortunes of Mark Zuckerberg's result in poverty for others, he adds. Lin agrees with Jurvetson: Facebook created billionaires, but it employs far less than Ford. Zachary thinks we're at the beginning of an unpleasant wave for rich people, because governments will tend to tax the rich to resolve this rich-poor gap.
Audience: Around 70% agree.
9) Personalized Medicine: The ability to cheaply sequence genomes means we will solve a lot of diseases, says Lin. Calling John Doerr, who predicted this years ago, and I think he wasn't the first. It's possible in a year or two that we can sequence a person's genome for $1000, maybe $100 in a few years. Machine learning and big data will allow us to understand this data and the medicine we need to fix our diseases. Paddles: half and half again.
Zachary, a red, thinks this will happen, but not in the next five years. It's not just your genome, but flora in your gut and the like. Maybe personalized medicine, but not personalized medications. Jurvetson notes this has been on the list five or six times (actually, seven to nine times, says Upbin), but thinks that while it's possible, we don't have socialized medicine, so privacy and insurance are big obstacles.
Cowan, a red, who lost money on a personalized medicine startup, says we still can't process the interplay among all these genes. The audience is slightly more in agreement than not.
10) Wearable Computing Is The Watch, Not The Glass: The watch supplants the phone as primary display and interface, says Zachary. Pebble, in which he has invested, has sold $36 million worth of its smart watches. Watches are just so natural for people to wear, unlike Google Glass. Paddles are all red! "That means I made a good investment," he says. "To be a good investor," responds Jurvetson, "you have to be contrarian and right." He notes that nobody under 35 wears a watch. Too geeky, adds Lin. Plus, says Ganesan, a watch has little of the utility of the phone.
And those are the top 10 trends, you read 'em here first. Jurvetson's predictions both got the top votes from the audience. What do you think?
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7deeaa2a7e49fb4d508be5f081049af4
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/05/31/google-eyes-brand-advertising-for-its-next-30-billion-opportunity/
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Google Eyes Brand Advertising For Its Next $30 Billion Opportunity
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Google Eyes Brand Advertising For Its Next $30 Billion Opportunity
Neal Mohan, Google's VP of display advertising, on right with LiveRamp CEO Auren Hoffman
After sewing up search advertising, Google has spent the last couple of years putting together the pieces of a plan to make display ads its next multibillion-dollar business.
But it's not done yet. And display ads, those banners and video ads that underwrite most websites, are a much more competitive market than search ads, with Facebook , a newly energized Yahoo , and a raft of ad tech companies all making plays to carve out big chunks of the market. So when Neal Mohan, Google's longtime VP of display ads, speaks, lots of people listen to find out what Google has in mind.
In a keynote interview at the ad tech conference RampUp near Google's Mountain View headquarters today, Mohan didn't reveal much new. But in the interview with Auren Hoffman, CEO of conference sponsor LiveRamp, and in a brief conversation I had with Mohan afterwards, he identified Google's next big target: brand advertising now largely done on TV and in magazines.
That's not entirely new either, but Mohan said he thinks Google and ad tech in general--to date mostly dedicated to helping direct marketers--is finally on the cusp of attracting significant brand advertising. Here's what he had to say, edited and sometimes paraphrased:
Q: What has surprised you about how the industry has changed?
Mohan: How much hasn't changed. We're still incredibly early in the game in terms of what needs to happen. It's a $30 billion ecosystem, but it's still really early days.
One of the big things that's changing over the last three or four years is technology innovation that could open up the next $30 billion. It's a confluence of consumer behavior changing--we all live our lives online 24/7--and ad tech innovation from big data and the ability to apply that big data.
We're finally starting to make inroads in getting rich, interactive creative up fast.
And we're starting to crack measurement thanks to all the data.
Q: What are you worried about?
Mohan: Collectively, the industry can lose sight of the end goal, which is to create something meaningful to consumers. When we get caught up in brandspeak and three-letter acronyms, we lose sight of that.
Q: Is the gap in sophistication between more advanced direct advertisers and less tech-focused brand advertisers narrowing yet?
Mohan: It's less about whether brand or performance advertisers are sophisticated or not. It's that digital has not really been ready to be useful for brand advertisers until recently. Brand advertisers care about finding the audience, engaging with them, and measuring the results. For each of those three things, ad technology is really getting useful for them.
We also have new ways for brands to create a rich, engaging environment, like the Lightbox ad format and the TrueView video ad format (which lets viewers skip the ads after a few seconds if they don't like them).
Q: How much fraud is going on in display?
Mohan: There's always going to be bad actors. It's something we take very seriously. It's hard to quantify. Viewability is one aspect of it--you have to prove to brands their ad was seen. And you need to provide proof of offline sales. It's a $200 billion opportunity if we can crack those pillars with technology.
Q: What will be the most significant change in advertising from technology in 15 years?
Mohan: The real question we should all be asking ourselves is can we create experiences that are truly memorable. We should be aspiring toward digital campaigns and experiences that are as memorable as TV ads 20 years ago.
Q: What technologies will enable this?
Mohan: A lot of this has to do with following the consumer. For example, they're using multiple screens. There will be wearable devices. That technology will continue to evolve.
We are going to have to get used to an advertising model that is 100% driven by consumer choice. For example, TrueView ads (on YouTube) can be skipped, so that will change how advertising works.
Q: Give us an outlandish prediction for two to three years out.
Mohan (who doesn't do outlandish): First, a third of advertising will be measured beyond the click. That will be over half of online advertising in a couple years. Second, there will be user choice around advertising--half of all advertising will be something where users will actively choose to engage in it.
In a post-interview conversation, Mohan elaborated a bit on the brand ad opportunity. He contends that ads like TrueView are already attracting lots of brand advertising to YouTube (upwards of $3 billion in revenues last year by some estimates).
But what about the notion, raised in another panel by Andy Atherton, a senior VP at real-time ad platform AppNexus, that the problem isn't technology but getting tens of thousands of ad folks at marketers and agencies to change how they work? Mohan said he thinks providing better ways to measure the impact on online ads, one of the prime jobs at Google (and other companies such as Facebook for that matter), will do the trick eventually.
"If we can prove digital costs half as much or has twice the effectiveness," he said, "that's what brand people need to justify changing what they're doing."
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557cef2a2e6732973ce9df4916df58e4
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/07/04/why-so-many-people-are-mourning-the-passing-of-doug-engelbart/
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Why So Many People Are Mourning The Passing Of Doug Engelbart
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Why So Many People Are Mourning The Passing Of Doug Engelbart
Much of the latest generation of tech startups, and probably two generations before that, must wonder what's with all the eloquent eulogies about Doug Engelbart, who died July 2 at age 88. He's often called the father of the computer mouse, but he introduced the world to so much more that it's hard to believe the innovations came from the mind of one man (thought it must be said, since he was a seminal proponent of computer-driven collaboration, that many colleagues added their own thinking and engineering to his vision).
Technologies that we still use today--videoconferencing, bitmapped displays, screen windowing, real-time text editing, hypertext that prefigured the World Wide Web, and, of course, the mouse--all were shown at what's known as "the mother of all demos" at a computer conference in San Francisco in 1968. Steve Jobs, whose Apple Computer would refine and popularize many, but not all, of these technologies, was still a 13-year-old student at Cupertino Junior High.
I was fortunate enough to cross Engelbart's path at least a couple of times, most recently at an event at Stanford University in late 2008 commemorating the 40th anniversary of that demo. The 1968 video of the demo still gives me tingles for the amazing breadth of technologies he and his colleagues marshaled at a time when computing was still done with punch cards fed into room-sized computers. If you haven't seen it already, spend a piece of your holiday weekend checking it out.
But I was also blessed to have had a chance to interview him in person in 2003 for a story I wrote about my search for the next big thing in technology. I drove across the Dumbarton Bridge in the southern San Francisco Bay to Logitech, the maker of computer mice and other peripherals that provided him with an office. He seemed a little out of place at a company bustling with people a third his age.
Speaking softly but still with an urgent energy, Engelbart was generous with his time. As he sketched his latest thinking on his longtime quest to augment intelligence and speed up innovation of all kinds, I was alternately entranced and a little confused. I simply couldn't get my arms around his "bootstrapping" vision of how to turbocharge innovation and raise our collective intelligence. I could tell he was a little frustrated not only with my struggles to understand, but also with what he viewed as the limited scope of innovation in latter-day Silicon Valley that he felt would benefit greatly from his ideas.
At some point, he sensed that my attention was flagging from the cognitive overload and decided to wind down the interview, though he offered with his unfailing politeness to follow up with me later as I continued my quest. I still regret not managing to get his thoughts into the story.
Unfortunately, I wasn't the only one who couldn't quite grok the fullness of his vision, and he never got much support to turn it into something with widespread practicality. As a close friend of his, futurist Paul Saffo, told me after I interviewed Engelbart and confessed I didn't quite get what he was saying, it's a curse to be 50 years ahead of your time. Whether that's tragic, as Tom Foremski believes, I'm not sure. Engelbart certainly got the credit he deserved, at least later in his life, if not the riches that so many people who piggybacked on his ideas did.
We need more people like Engelbart who can stretch their minds beyond the here and now, who are brave enough to keep pushing even when they're not understood. The upside of his overreaching is that perhaps we've still only scratched the surface of what Engelbart envisioned. I won't be surprised if decades after his death, innovations that leverage his thinking will be continuing to transform the world.
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b0c8e17bf27f19f2442f7d4db8c60685
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/07/28/sorry-ipad-mini-fans-reviewers-say-google-has-the-hotter-tablet-than-apple/
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Sorry, iPad Mini Fans--Reviewers Say Google Has The Better Tablet Than Apple
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Sorry, iPad Mini Fans--Reviewers Say Google Has The Better Tablet Than Apple
*Update: Upon reflecting on the reasonable comment of a reader, I changed the headline to say reviewers say Google has the "better" tablet, not the "hotter" tablet. In contrast to a year ago, when Google's new Nexus 7 got attention for its smaller form factor and sold out (admittedly on an undisclosed level of sales), we can't yet say the new Nexus 7 is "hotter." But most reviewers so far lean toward calling it the better one at this point in time.
As soon as Google announced its new Nexus 7 small tablet on July 24, the natural question emerged: How does it stack up against the Apple 's industry-leading iPad mini?
The answer, according to a number of reviewers: Pretty darn well. In fact, several reviewers place the Nexus 7 ahead of the iPad mini, and at least one recommends it over the iPad mini thanks to a combination of features that beat its rivals':
* It's cheaper. That hasn't changed despite the slight price hike, from $199 to $229 for the base model. And if value matters most to you, the fact that this is a model with several noticeable improvements makes it an even easier choice vs. an iPad mini that costs a full $100 more.
* It has a better screen than the iPad mini. And that's not all. It also has more hand-friendly proportions, and snappier graphics and app switching thanks to new chips.
* It has wireless charging. This is hardly a deal-breaker, and you need to buy the charger for extra, but it can be awfully convenient.
* It has fixed some shortcomings. The Nexus 7 now sports a rear-facing camera in addition to the front-facing one, like the iPad mini. And the better-placed, better-engineered speakers have much better sound, a problem with the old one. Battery life seems to be quite good, too.
Just like last year, timing makes a huge difference in the attention and praise the Nexus 7 is getting. At that time, Apple didn't have the iPad mini, and it seems there was pent-up demand for a smaller tablet. This year, of course, the iPad mini is out, but it's nine months old while Google had the opportunity to use the latest screen and other technologies.
That may or may not change later this year. Recent rumors about the timing of a new iPad mini waffle between claims that there will be one in the fall and that it won't arrive until early 2014. But more rumors seem to agree that an iPad mini with a sharper Retina screen that would rival or exceed the Nexus 7's screen won't be coming until next year.
And even now, the iPad has some advantages over the Nexus 7. At 7.9 inches, the screen is enough bigger that it might sway people. It's offered with a wider range of storage options. And it's hard to deny that the iPad mini still looks more polished from a design standpoint.
Those aren't the only reasons the Nexus 7 won't be running away with the tablet business. Apple still offers many more tablet-optimized apps, which may explain why it appears that iPad users account for a dominant share of actual tablet Web traffic. (MLB.tv keeps crashing on my new Nexus 7 model, even though it still works on the old one--nearly a deal-breaker until and unless it's fixed.)
And if you have an iPhone, you may want to stick with an iPad for compatibility, so you don't have to buy music twice, for instance. Not least, while Google's and its manufacturers' support of their older machines can be hit-and-miss after a new model comes out, you can be pretty sure Apple won't orphan your iPad for years to come.
Still, the bottom line is that Google has come out clearly ahead of Apple twice now with small tablets, and it doesn't look like the situation will change very soon. As a result, Google is posing a challenge to Apple that no one else, even Amazon with its credible but somewhat limited Kindle Fire, has done in quite a while.
Gallery: Apple iPad Mini Unveiled 14 images View gallery
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dbf7f275efcd28c5ea061177adef8bd7
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/08/14/youtubes-prankster-engineer-keeps-googles-video-site-humming/
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YouTube's Prankster Engineer Keeps Google's Video Site Humming
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YouTube's Prankster Engineer Keeps Google's Video Site Humming
Billy Biggs (Photo: Jonny Mack)
You probably don't know his name, but Billy Biggs is one of the people who has helped keep Google on Forbes' list of the world's most innovative companies.
In the third annual version of the list out today, Forbes highlights nearly a dozen next-generation innovators who are expected to create the products and services these companies will be counting on to remain innovation machines.
Biggs, a software engineer at YouTube since Google bought the video site in 2006, has had a hand in most of the major projects there already. But at just 35, he will be called upon to create many more. Overall, he says, his work is about “making sure the systems are built for the future and we’re able to build cool things”--even if he doesn’t yet know what they will be. Here's a closer look at his work:
Billy Biggs likes to say pranks are his full-time job at YouTube, Google’s video service. For April Fool’s Day 2010, for instance, he and a few other software engineers created a new video display format called TEXTp. Ostensibly aimed at cutting network bandwidth costs, it turned YouTube videos into colorful streams of text characters.
Don’t let those hijinks fool you. Labeled a “hidden gem” by a former YouTube executive, Biggs has had a hand in nearly every major technical project there since Google bought it in 2006. His work as principal architect for YouTube’s computer systems and software and its website is credited with helping YouTube reach an industry-leading 6 billion hours of video a month viewed by more than a billion people.
That massive audience has put the site in a position to challenge television for consumer attention and marketer budgets--just as TV faces many new challenges to its reign as the world's most popular entertainment medium.
Looking little more than half his 35 years, with short-cropped brown hair and thick-framed black glasses, Biggs has been “doing computers since forever.” He composes electronic music and codes video, music, and Internet telephony software for fun--though he talks wistfully of Internet phone software he wrote years before eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion.
After joining YouTube from Google in 2006, he worked on everything from the video player to search to the best way to show video thumbnail images, but most of his work centered on simply keeping various parts of the site from crashing. Since then, he has helped engineer constant refinements such as the ability to view full 1080p high-definition video and a video editor that automatically fixes shaky or dark videos.
More recently, Biggs helped develop the systems software for YouTube’s personalized video recommendations, which just received a technical Emmy. YouTube credits that service with prompting millions of additional hours of daily video views.
He’s also chief architect on the technologies behind YouTube’s recent initiative to promote more TV-like channels, subscriptions for which have doubled in the past 18 months. Currently he’s trying to make sure videos and new features look consistent and come out simultaneously on everything from a Sony PlayStation to a smartphone to a television.
Not least, Biggs encourages a startup feel at YouTube by maintaining a “rough and quick” product development culture. That culture continues to be apparent in the unit's separate headquarters 30 miles north of Google's. Staffers whiz by on scooters, descend to the first floor on a big red slide, and tap on their laptops beside a mini-golf course, but it all feels like more than just window dressing.
According to folks at YouTube, Biggs can take credit for helping to maintain that culture. “He’s a large part of the reason people like to work here,” says current boss and engineering director John Harding. That, and anticipation of his next prank.
Gallery: Next Gen Movers: 10 Rising Stars At The World's Most Innovative Companies 10 images View gallery
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34da77d366ec957c32132f9c00e1b9bd
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/08/23/as-google-ventures-invests-250-million-in-uber-whats-next-driverless-cars-on-demand/
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As Google Ventures Invests $250 Million In Uber, What's Next? Driverless Cars On Demand?
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As Google Ventures Invests $250 Million In Uber, What's Next? Driverless Cars On Demand?
Google Ventures, Google's supposedly early-stage investment arm, just pumped more than $250 million into the on-demand car service Uber, according to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher. Along with other investors, principally private-equity firm TPG, Uber has raised a total of $360 million, commanding a stunning valuation of about $3.5 billion.
That valuation is amazing enough, if not entirely surprising given that it was revealed last month--and given its apparent momentum as an alternative to taxis. But what's most intriguing is the heavy involvement of Google Ventures. The $250 million-plus it's putting into Uber is pretty close to its entire annual commitment of funding of $300 million. (Update: Uber has confirmed a $258 million round, led by Google, so Google's portion looks like most of it. It hasn't confirmed how much, however.)
At this late hour Thursday night, I haven't been able to reach Google about its interest, though that interest is clearly deep. According to Swisher, the investment happened in part because of the intervention of Google CEO Larry Page.
But already, people are speculating about why Google seems so interested in Uber. The most obvious guess is that Google envisions combining Uber's service with its famous self-driving cars. Imagine calling an Uber black car and not even having to pay a tip!
But self-driving Ubers seem pretty unlikely, certainly anytime soon. (Update: Then again, maybe not! It seems Google is looking at not only producing its own cars but creating a cab fleet.) Even if David Drummond , Google's chief legal officer and senior VP of corporate development, is joining Uber's board and thus wield some influence, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is in charge and clearly has his own plans for his company. Even more than that, there are a lot of moving parts to coordinate before self-driving cars become common, let alone as private taxis. And of course, these aren't truly driverless cars. You still need a human behind the wheel. So this idea, obvious as it may seem to many people who piped up to suggest it, quickly dissolves.
An even more fascinating possibility, and the one Google is probably more interested in, is Uber's potential as a delivery service. More than a year ago, Uber made a splash with ice cream trucks on demand, apparently as a publicity stunt. But recently, some folks have raised serious possibilities about Uber moving goods as well as people. Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang, for instance, thinks it could become the next Amazon of the sharing economy:
The future state of Uber delivers anything you need on-demand, disrupting Amazon. I imagine that Uber will expand beyond town cars and ice cream trucks and activate the crowd to become couriers at the local level. Anything you need, on-demand with a push of the button will be made available. As they’ve already been savvy enough to provide helicopters to wealthy people in Manhattan who wanted to find a way around the traffic to get to their mansions in the Hamptons, or ice cream during a heat wave, they know how to seek out inventory that’s readily available and make available, on-demand.
Why would Google care about that? Currently, it's making a big play for Google Shopping Express , testing same-day delivery in the San Francisco Bay area. I tried it once, ordering paper towels from the local Walgreen 's store, and the guy who delivered it appeared to be a Walgreen's store manager, judging from his name tag, using his own car. No doubt Google would like access to a more organized on-demand delivery fleet.
What's more, Kalanick has talked recently about how Uber could be an "everything on demand" company:
The way we look at what Uber is it's the cross between lifestyle, which is give me what I want and give it to me right now, which we've seen online, right? We all -- remember, it was like instant gratification. It was like the wave of the future in the early 2000s, right? Give me what I want, give it to me right now, and the logistics to get it to you, right? So today, we're in the business of delivering cars. We're delivering a car to you that you, then, can do whatever you want with. Well, the car has a driver as well.
OK, so there's a heck of a long way from delivering ice cream to disrupting Amazon. And no doubt Uber has its hands full just addressing the highly competitive and politically fraught business of on-demand cars that aren't registered taxi services.
But ideas like this make it a little easier to understand why Google Ventures is pumping more into Uber than any other company it has invested in to date. And why Uber was happy to accept it.
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6298211ca4fedb921a046dc1abaed24e
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/09/19/jerry-yangs-revenge-yahoo-shares-top-31-the-price-microsoft-offered-in-2008/
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Jerry Yang's Revenge: Yahoo Shares Top $31, The Price Microsoft Offered In 2008
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Jerry Yang's Revenge: Yahoo Shares Top $31, The Price Microsoft Offered In 2008
Jerry Yang, one of the founders of Yahoo! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Somewhere out there, Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang must be shouting his company's name for the first time in years.
That's because Yahoo closed above $31 a share--by three pennies--for the first time since October 2007, a few months before Microsoft made a blockbuster offer to buy the company for that same price per share. And for all that current CEO Marissa Mayer has done to revive the long-dormant company, it's finally worth giving Yang due credit for Yahoo's stock success for the past year--not to mention its very existence.
Investors can reasonably argue that Yahoo's shares were dead for years following Yang's much-criticized intransigence against Microsoft's buyout offer. So simply because they're now worth a few cents more than Microsoft initially offered (though still a little less than the $33 Microsoft later offered) doesn't mean Yang's decision was the right one at the time. Or even now, five years later, given where Yahoo investors' money could have been better deployed. Google's shares, for instance, while volatile over the years, are about 75% higher than in February 2008.
Still, at least in Silicon Valley, no small number of people at the time thought Yahoo deserved more than to become a unit of Microsoft. Really, does even the most bearish Yahoo investor think that the company would have been better off today--if it still existed--or that it would be producing more value to investors or users if it had been consumed by Microsoft back in 2008? It seemed apparent that whatever was left of Yahoo would slowly wither away inside a software giant that has never seemed committed to media, technology-powered or not.
Even if many people may still believe Yang--and Yahoo's board, which was just as culpable in the deal's demise--should have taken Microsoft's offer, few can argue that Yang more than anyone else can take credit for Yahoo's more than doubling of its share price in the past year. CEO Marissa Mayer has revitalized products, bought many startups such as Tumblr, and made Yahoo a place where people want to work again. But that's not chiefly what has driven shares up during her tenure, because revenue growth still hasn't returned and Mayer herself insists the turnaround will be a multiyear effort.
What's really driving Yahoo's shares, most analysts reckon, is its stake in fast-rising Chinese Internet powerhouse Alibaba. And who championed that investment, which already has returned billions of dollars to Yahoo shareholders during Mayer's reign and given Mayer cash for all those acquisitions? That would be Jerry Yang. Even Mayer credited him at a technology conference recently. "There are certainly some smart investments that I owe to my predecessors," she said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. "Very notably, Jerry Yang's investment in Alibaba is something that people are very excited about."
Yang, who stepped down as CEO in 2009 after the Microsoft debacle--if you can still call it that--no longer has a role at Yahoo. He resigned the board last year.
Related on Forbes:
Gallery: Yahoo's Top 10 Biggest Acquisitions 10 images View gallery
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7fc6a55d71e19d4dd2cb351fbc846b52
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/11/21/lifelong-learning-service-curious-com-inks-first-co-branded-deal-with-sunset-magazine/
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Lifelong Learning Service Curious.com Inks First Co-Branded Deal With Sunset Magazine
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Lifelong Learning Service Curious.com Inks First Co-Branded Deal With Sunset Magazine
Since launching in May, Curious.com has amassed some 3,000 instructional videos from more than 400 experts looking to pass on their knowledge in bite-sized video chunks, and eventually make a little money. They range from how to handle a chef's knife to how to make various tennis shots, mostly by people who aren't teachers but know their particular stuff.
Now, the Menlo Park (Calif.) company aims to bring on well-known brands to lend some name appeal and proven expertise. Today, Curious announced its first co-branded collection of lessons with Sunset, the Western-living magazine owned by Time Warner . The magazine has created Sunset Seminars on Curious.com, starting with 19 lessons in three categories: holiday meals, wine essentials, and container gardening.
Each features Sunset editors presenting short, interactive videos that include, like most Curious video lessons, brief exercises along with extras--in this case, recipes, product and book suggestions and, not surprisingly, a Sunset magazine subscription offer. Sunset wine editor Sara Schneider, for instance, provides lessons on how to judge various kinds of wine and pick them out in the wine aisle. Viewers, or "learners" as Curious calls them, can ask the instructors questions and even get feedback on their own creations.
Curious was cofounded by CEO Justin Kitch, Chief Technology Officer Thai Bui, and engineering chief John Tokash. Kitch and Bui were cofounders and Tokash an early employee of the small-business website platform Homestead that Intuit bought in 2007. In a way, Curious is a Web 3.0 take on Homestead, this time providing a way for teachers pro or amateur to become entrepreneurs by giving them tools such as editing services and of course the platform itself to provide quick, casual ways to learn about subjects. People can sign up for lessons, mostly free for now. While Curious eventually plans to provide ways for teachers to charge, it's providing varying amounts of its own "coins" for free to users initially to pay for lessons.
In recent months, some other large brands Kitch wouldn't name have sought out Curious to see if they might also do some co-branded lessons. Kitch says the company is in "active discussions" with brands he wouldn't name, though he says they could range from media companies such as the Golf Channel to retailers such as Home Depot to celebrities and sports stars--anyone who could credibly teach something.
That's why Sunset, known for its how-to articles and books, was a natural--that, and the fact that Sunset headquarters are across the street from Curious' office. For now, the Sunset effort, a separate "collection" on the site, which also features a half-dozen other collections such as language and crafting, is a pilot. It's intended to help Curious determine how well brands can do lessons like these and how they're best presented on the site. "The question is whether Sunset can drive people to spending 30 minutes learning something," says Kitch.
At first glance, instructional videos look like a crowded space. There are the fast-growing academic-oriented sites such as Coursera, Udacity, and Khan Academy. Perhaps closer to home, there are how-to sites such as wikiHow, Instructables, and Demand Media's eHow. Kitch contends the former require more commitment than the more casual lifelong learning he's aiming at, and most of the latter's dependence on advertising for support means they require a lot of traffic that often results in low-quality ads. And of course there's Google's YouTube video site. "You can find amazing gems on YouTube," Kitch concedes, but he says they're hard to find and don't offer interaction with the creator beyond comments.
So Kitch thinks there's room for Curious' bite-sized lessons of 5 to 15 minutes each. The number of lessons viewed has been growing quickly, Kitch says, from 400,000 at the end of September to 800,000 today. Kitch's near-term goal is to reach 1 million visits a month. He reckons Curious will be about halfway there by year-end. A mil a month, he says, is enough to make it worthwhile to test out ways to make money.
Although Curious hasn't decided on particular monetization methods, Kitch guesses that the main vehicle will be micropayments, perhaps a coin per lesson, or less-than-micropayments such as, say, $20 for a Sunset video lesson collection. Kitch is also experimenting with tips, bundled lessons at a discount, and the ability to sell products. One teacher who does wilderness survival lessons, for instance, sells a wilderness survival kit. Not least, he thinks getting one-on-one assistance from teachers or other experts is something enough people will pay for. Kitch expects to get a better sense of what will work best in the next quarter or two.
Perhaps surprisingly, one thing Kitch doesn't plan to do is run advertising. "We made a pledge not to do advertising," he says. "It doesn't work for this [niche] content. You have to go so 'Gangnam Style' to get enough traffic that you can't do this kind of content." Of course, we've heard this no-advertising pledge before, even from Google, so things could change. But Kitch sounds adamant about making alternatives work, as he did with subscription-based Homestead.
The company, with 16 employees, has raised $7.5 million from Redpoint Ventures, Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell, Kitch himself and others.
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d9acc1474e342e6b6736f7e422ee7d41
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/12/19/instagram-says-its-brand-advertising-campaigns-are-working/
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Instagram Says Its Brand Advertising Campaigns Are Working
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Instagram Says Its Brand Advertising Campaigns Are Working
Less than two months after Instagram debuted ads on its mobile photo sharing app, the results are in: They work!
At least that's according to Instagram itself, which obviously has a stake in saying they worked. More than that, it surely made certain that they would work by allowing a select group of four brands that already were active on the Facebook property to do campaigns. So take the positive results for what they are, which is a very early look provided by the very company that stands to benefit from what it characterizes as positive results.
Anyway, the gist is that Instagram and the four brands that did campaigns, including Levi's and Ben & Jerry's, believe that their campaigns reached a broad swath of users even with a very light ad load per user. And given the brand-oriented metrics they cite, it's clear that the company views Instagram as a brand advertising medium more like television than, say, Google's search or most display ads.
Here are the results they provided:
Reach All four initial ad campaigns measured were successful at delivering the broad reach our advertisers were seeking. The marketers achieved a high impact with a very low average frequency of ad impressions per user. Levi’s reached 7.4 million people in the U.S. across a nine-day period, targeting people aged 18-34. Ben & Jerry’s reached 9.8 million people in the U.S. over eight days, targeting people aged 18-35. Ad Recall Across the four campaigns, there was a 32-point incremental lift in ad recall per campaign for people who were repeatedly exposed to a particular campaign versus control groups. Awareness
Across the four campaigns, there was a ten-point incremental lift in brand message awareness per campaign for people who were repeatedly exposed to a particular campaign versus control groups. In particular, seventeen percent of people who saw a single ad for Ben & Jerry’s Scotchy Scotch Scotch-flavored ice cream not only became aware of the new flavor, they also associated it with the brand.
All that said, Instagram took pains to point out that these are very early tests whose results may or may not prove out as the company expands its ad program. Indeed, its Tumblr post acknowledges, "We believe that early campaigns may benefit from an overall increase in awareness of ads on Instagram due to their recent introduction." In other words, they're a novelty right now, so they're bound to get people checking them out, but there's no telling yet whether they will continue to attract this much attention going forward. The company said it would continue to "optimize" ad formats.
Still, if Instagram can replicate the results with other brands, it could help Facebook grow its mobile ad business even faster. According to a new report from eMarketer, the social network is set to remain the No. 2 seller of mobile ads. Although it is still quite a bit behind Google, it's gaining. Facebook's share of the mobile ad market will rise from 9% last year to 16% this year, while Google's share will fall from 49.8% to 41.5%.
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cc7619b77aa4bdcfc6f5653503f110cb
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/01/24/display-ads-as-compelling-as-tv-spots-a-conversation-with-google-vp-neal-mohan/
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Display Ads As Compelling As TV Spots: A Conversation With Google VP Neal Mohan
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Display Ads As Compelling As TV Spots: A Conversation With Google VP Neal Mohan
In the lobby of Google’s Building 900 at its Mountain View headquarters, there’s a display of Google-colored squares and rectangles that looks like a bland abstract-art piece. It turns out these are the shape and relative size of standard display-ad units that run on nearly every commercial website.
The “display” display exposes the paradox of Google’s attempt to extend its dominion over online ads to the realm of image advertising done chiefly on television and in glossy magazines. To get the wide reach of television, the company needs to shoehorn image ads into those standardized, easy-to-buy units, but it also needs to provide technology that allows marketers to do more compelling pitches inside those boxes. Resolving that paradox is the job of Neal Mohan, Google's vice president of display ads.
After joining the company with the $3.2 billion acquisition of display technology firm DoubleClick in 2007, Mohan has helped build or buy what’s likely the industry's broadest set of technologies needed to create, place, and measure the impact of display ads. In an extensive interview for a story in the current issue of Forbes, we talked about how he and hundreds of engineers in Mountain View and New York City are trying to apply that technology to wrest billions of brand advertising dollars from TV. This is an edited version of our conversation.
Q: Could you lay out the key challenges today in getting more brand advertising to move online?
A: The primary use case for advertisers online is generally performance-oriented. That applies not just to search advertising but frankly to display, and even video ads have been performance-oriented. That’s done the industry well. There’s been a lot of growth around impressions and clicks and conversions.
But the next big opportunity for the industry if we are going to grow it not just X percent a year but 10X over the next few years is to crack this brand advertising nut. It’s not about display banners or text ads or rich media or video or mobile. It’s really about all of the above, and what the objectives of the brand advertiser are. It’s more upper-funnel campaigns where brands are looking to establish their brand or a new product that they’re looking to bring to market.
Q: Why the focus on brand advertising now?
A: There are a couple of things coming together that make this the right time for this opportunity to be addressed. The first is just the fundamental consumer trend. Fifty-seven percent of media consumption is online now, greater than any other channel combined, including television.
The second piece is that the technology is coming together to allow brands to address their consumers in the digital environment in ways that they have never been able to do before.
Q: How so?
A: Our roadmap and strategy for brands is … less what product feature or product Google should build but what are the fundamental problems that brands are looking to solve. It starts with identity. A brand has to have an identity, something that it’s looking to communicate. The beauty of digital is that the tools we can give to brands for this are so much more expansive than anything they’ve had in the past.
Q: Like what?
A: Like custom YouTube channels. Now for the first time, brands can truly publish their identity and keep it fresh and real-time and interactive. Like what Red Bull did with their Stratos campaign. We also have Google+ pages where brands can not only publish their identity but they can interact and engage with those followers. They can reward followers for engaging with the brands.
Q: What other problems are you trying to solve for brands?
A: It’s not just about publishing identity but it’s about truly connecting with those consumers. How did it work in TV land? For many decades, it meant you bought time in primetime on the three major networks and reached 80% of the U.S. audience but you did that in a way that was pretty unsophisticated. It was much more of a pray-and-spray approach where you’re probably getting in some of the right audience, some of the audience probably found the advertising irrelevant, but if the reach was broad enough, maybe you got the message to the right amount of people.
The beauty of digital is that you can get much more precise, but you can combine that precision with true reach. For example, running a brand campaign across the Google Display Network including YouTube and our mobile network, you can reach something like a billion users but you can do that at the precision level that you really care about. So for example, if you’re launching a product, and all you really want to reach are a custom audience that you know is going to be interested in your product--soccer moms in this age group with this type of household characteristic--you can do that. Digital allows you to do precision at scale. That has been a challenge for brands for a long time.
Q: Many would still consider it a challenge to get really broad reach in digital, at least as easily as in TV.
A: They consider it a challenge in TV too. In TV land, they basically gave up trying to do that.
Q: But there are brands that say, Look, I can still get easy reach with enough targeting on TV.
A: The targeting is basically you buy a bunch of shows where there’s some demographic association with the brand. Forty percent of your audience is going to be wasted because it’s not really that demographic you were targeting, they just happened to be watching the shows sitting next to their spouse, for example.
Q: I’m sure you hear this message from brands, though.
A: I hear the fact that you can get broad reach on TV. I never hear the fact that the targeting actually works for them. What we hear is, Hey, if I’m going to shift dollars to digital, the first problem you need to address is this notion of broad reach. With the advent of what we can do with the Google Display Network, what we can do on YouTube, the question of whether you can truly reach an audience that looks and feels like television has been addressed.
Now the next challenge for digital is to deliver on that promise of precision, which is something that television could never actually achieve. One of the big brands we work with is Kellogg, a classic brand advertiser looking to reach a particular demographic, but a broad swath of that demographic. They use our DoubleClick technology stack--DoubleClick Bid Manager, which is our new version of Invite Media--and they are buying the age and gender criteria that they’re looking for.
And they’re buying it in real time, bidding in real time, and they’re buying it at the precision levels they want where they’re only buying that audience. They’re willing to pay 5X more for that audience [compared with standard run-of-network rates]--I’m just making that up, some multiple--than they would have paid if they were doing the spray-and-pray approach [on TV], because they know they’re getting exactly what they’re looking for.
Q: Programmatic or automated ad buying is still used mostly by direct marketers, though.
A: People often think of programmatic buying as a means to buy banners on the cheap across multiple websites. It’s the contrary. Big brands, brands like Kellogg, are using it as a means to deliver on this vision of precision at scale. So they get the broad reach--they can reach the hundreds of millions of users that they could reach on television--but now they can do it with zero waste.
From a brand advertiser’s perspective, that’s a very compelling proposition. And the fastest-growing format in the programmatic channel is video. We’ve seen a 3X increase in video buying on our ad exchange in the last few months, video being a format primarily bought by brands.
Q: Once you reach the right people, you still have to provide a marketing message they’ll respond to. How are you trying to get beyond the plain-vanilla banner ad?
A: One thing that Google is betting on is this notion of consumer choice. Unlike traditional channels, whether it’s TV or magazines or what have you--where, let’s face it, no matter how creative you were from a brand standpoint, it was still one-way communication--in the digital sphere it can be truly a two-way street. The biggest evidence of that is what Google is doing around ad formats.
So there’s the TrueView [a YouTube video ad] format where you as an advertiser don’t pay if a user skips your ad. And as a consumer, if you don’t like that ad, you skip it, which I think is pretty revolutionary. The risk has always been, well, is that actually going to work for publishers? TrueView’s the fastest-growing ad format on YouTube by far, so clearly it’s working for us as a publisher and for our content partners as well.
Q: That’s just on YouTube. What about beyond that one site?
A: We’ve tried to take that concept of consumer choice and make it something that’s ubiquitous across the Internet. So what we’re doing on our Google Display Network, which consists of a couple million websites from the largest to the smallest publishers, is this concept of Engagement Ads. We just concluded a video livestream of a big Samsung launch [for the Gear and Galaxy Note III products, on Sept. 4] that was literally playing in a display ad all across the Internet. It’s how they did the product launch. They targeted it only to the audience they thought would be interested in this product. You can get an audience that’s very large very quickly across the network.
But the most interesting aspect of it was … that the consumers actually raised their hands and decided to consume that content. The way the ad works is it starts off as a standard display creative, but if you scroll the mouse or swipe over the ad, it expands into a full, 100% share of voice experience for that brand. You can replace that livestream with a product catalog, a video catalog, whatever sort of rich media engagement you want. But the key thing is that as an advertiser, they didn’t pay for that first impression. They only paid for the ad when the user actually expanded it into the full experience.
Q: How have Engagement Ads done?
A: They vary by campaign. They’re being used fairly widely, though we don’t break out the run rate. We have dozens of campaigns that are running them for large brands. Of the top 50 publishers that run Engagement Ad campaigns, the RPMs [revenue per thousand views] that they see on those pages are 2X what they otherwise would have seen. So it’s paying off in spades.
But all of these efforts are early. It’s truly going to be a multi-year effort.
Q: Can you close the loop and prove all this is resulting in sales down the line?
A: What led to the success of digital for performance advertising is that it was measurable. You got an immediate on impressions and clicks and how clicks tied to conversions. In the brand space, you don’t have that. In the television world, you buy a bunch of reach and frequency, maybe a big chunk of it is wasted, maybe a bunch of it is not, and then you do longitudinal studies to say this is tied to this kind of lift because I ran the campaign in this geography and I saw this differential.
Q: And many would say that kind of measurement works with some precision.
A: You’re not going to get it down to the precision in the digital world, but directionally you can run an experiment to show that there’s lift from a TV campaign in terms of sales. There’s decades of measurement there. And I’m the first person to remind all our internal teams around that point.
But I think digital can actually do this better. The most fundamental place to start in any kind of advertising is whether human beings saw the ad. This is why we’re betting so heavily on technology like Active View [a standard similar to TrueView that says at least half the ad was seen for a second or more]. It’s something that we’re building natively into our DoubleClick ad server products both for publishers and advertisers but is also a standard that we’re going to use across any media that we sell on YouTube or the Google Display Network or AdMob. (It did just that in December.)
A few months ago, we announced a capability that we deliver to our brands where they can understand what those views are doing in terms of metrics brands care about, like brand recall and brand effectiveness, brand favorability. It was a product we launched using Google consumer surveys, where you could actually survey users at scale to get statistically significant feedback in real time with a control group that could actually show true brand lift.
Q: And are they producing that lift?
A: The lift we’re getting on campaigns, whether they’re Engagement Ad campaigns like the Samsung livestream or TrueView campaigns, is pretty substantial. It’s not tiny, incremental lift. The key thing that digital will be able to solve that never was possible in the traditional world is not just giving feedback on whether this is working or not, but actually doing it in as near real-time as possible. So you can actually make corrections in the middle of your campaigns as opposed to waiting three months after your campaign ended to get the results of your holiday campaign in April.
I looked at some results earlier this morning that showed this lift for a couple of big brands. After they ran an Engagement Ad campaign, were getting the feedback in real time, made some optimization changes over the course of the campaign and the net result in one case was a 59% increase in brand recall. Another one was around brand effectiveness, which saw a very substantial increase.
Q: How has better measurement changed the types of formats brand use?
A: In the traditional model, creative would build mini-30-second movies and not worry about anything and throw it over the wall, the media guys then would find a way to get distribution. That world is changing and is going to change forever. We see this in a lot of the feedback we hear from agency partners. The creative process and the media process are much more intertwined now than they ever used to be. You can’t build creative without an eye toward how it’s going to connect and engage with consumers.
One of the big things brands are asking us for is, I have a general storyline that I want to convey in an ad, but depending on who the audience is and who I’m getting in front of or who’s engaging with my ad. I might want to swap out the SUV for a convertible, for example. Because all I’m trying to do is convey something about my brand and the best way to do that is put a model in front of a user that is more likely to attract that user.
Q: A lot of agencies are set up to create TV ads, and their sales forces for various media are separate. How do you break through that?
A: Brands themselves are going to force that change not only in their own organizations but the agencies they work with. We’re working hand in hand with our agency partners to enable that. You’re going to see some components of it in the BrandLab and in how our agency teams are trying to help them work through some of these inertia issues you describe.
Consumers are going to change things for all of us. What happens five years from now when you’re watching television … but it’s delivered over a digital IP connection as opposed to an analog cable connection? What does the advertising on that look like? Basically, it looks like display advertising. You’re watching it on a TV, but it’s addressable, it’s measurable, it’s interactive.
Q: Does digital advertising usurp television advertising eventually, or does TV become digital and then you’re there already?
A: TV becomes digital. The consumer trends are going to be so strong in that direction. There will be a world where all the content we consume in this form is going to be digital in nature, in which case the advertising is therefore going to be digital in nature. It’s going to have all the characteristics--addressability, interactivity, precision--and in a few years, 100% of this type of advertising is therefore going to be digital advertising. So that’s why we’re investing so heavily in it. We have hundreds of engineers here in this building, hundreds in New York that are focused on solving this problem, because we think it’s a tremendous opportunity for the entire industry.
Q: The TV industry wants to keep control of those ad revenues, though, and it isn’t standing still.
A: The whole zero-sum game concept doesn’t make sense. Google is not going to be successful in addressing this brand advertising opportunity if it doesn’t deliver results for our publisher partners. And our publisher partners are a lot of these companies. We work with all the major media companies that are part of the Google Display Network. They use our DoubleClick platform products. If we crack this brand nut, they benefit.
Q: It may not be zero-sum, but you talk about getting a large chunk of the spend that currently goes to television. So aren’t you competing at some level?
A: Fundamentally we operate a network of publisher partners for whom we build advertising products, and if the publishers don’t make more money, Google doesn’t make more money. So at the end of the day, it’s about delivering results back to our publisher partners. It has to be an opportunity that grows the pie for everyone.
Q: A lot of existing publishers would say they’ve lost in this equation. They’re not making so much money online.
A: Three years ago, you’d hear publishers say I’m never going to do things like work with an exchange or do programmatic. I don’t hear that conversation from publishers today. What I hear from them is, OK, I can see this is a way to do things much more efficiently, it’s a way my buyers are telling me they want to conduct their business, it’s a way for me to get some value out of the data they have. In general, when I have conversations with publishers, it’s not about, “Hey, Google, what did you do to me?” It’s more about, “You need to deliver these products and capabilities to me faster.”
I can go back to my advertisers and say, you know what? That thing you were paying me $2 for is actually worth $20 because the metrics you were measuring it against, impressions and clicks, are not the right metrics, you should be measuring it against things like brand lift and recall and effectiveness. Oh, and by the way, instead of running a banner ad here, what if I was able to give you a Lightbox ad that gave you 100% share of voice as opposed to one of five ads on the page. Would you be willing to pay five or 10X for that?
Q: How well is that message getting through?
A: The big challenge before all of us is less about people doubting the opportunity and more about organizational inertia that needs to get broken through. People are used to the way things have worked for 50-plus years. The only way to address is to continue to build innovative products, work with our agency partners, and continue to chip away at it.
Q: What jazzes you about advertising, given that you’re in an area, Silicon Valley, where a lot of people even in the media business profess to hate ads?
A: One of the things that’s kept me excited during this entire time is, I’m a technologist at heart, an electrical engineer by training, I love computer science. Digital sits at the cross-section of media and creativity and technology. So day to day, that’s exciting.
But fundamentally, what motivates me and the hundreds of people here is that everything that we take for granted--Forbes, the New York Times, other great content on the web--the only reason it exists is what we are able to provide in terms of products and advertising. The vast majority of the free Internet is advertising-supported. Otherwise, that entire ecosystem would collapse.
Q: So you would not agree with the sentiment expressed years ago by Jeff Hammerbacher, who said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks”?
A: That’s frankly a very myopic way of looking at things. Advertising is a means to an end.
Q: Your boss Susan Wojcicki has talked about Google marrying the science of search with the art of display. How far along has Google gotten on the art side?
A: Fundamentally our strength is being the technology enabler for our partners. It’s not Google’s job to create an identity for a brand. Brands need to create their own identity. The creative agencies need to be the ones that convey that identity. We need to be the technology provider that makes it easy for them to do that.
So at BrandLab and in agency initiatives, we really are the technology partner, but we are not the ones that are bringing all of that creative insights to the table. I want to make this technology almost disappear. Success for me would be such great technology that it kind of disappears in the background, so digital ads can be just as memorable and powerful as TV ads.
The litmus test in digital should be: Can we actually create campaigns that are just as memorable and impactful as TV ads?
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4ad0fe5d1d2b3eedbb8e0bf78092e821
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/02/13/as-it-learns-new-ways-to-make-money-curious-com-gets-15-million-in-funding/
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As It Learns New Ways To Make Money, Curious.com Gets $15 Million In Funding
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As It Learns New Ways To Make Money, Curious.com Gets $15 Million In Funding
For all the online learning startups fighting for students, there's no lack of interest by investors.
Latest example: The online "lifelong learning" startup Curious.com, which is announcing today that it has closed a $15 million Series B round of venture funding. This time it includes GSV Capital, in addition to previous investors Redpoint Ventures, Silicon Valley uber-coach Bill Campbell and Altamont Capital Partners cofounder and Managing Director Jesse Rogers.
The Menlo Park (Calif.) company, which launched last May to provide instructional videos on a wide variety of subjects, will use the money to finance more growth that is already outpacing its own expectations, cofounder and CEO Justin Kitch said in an interview. It's now offering some 5,000 "lessons" from more than 700 teachers, up from 3,000 lessons and 400 teachers less than three months ago, when it signed a deal with Sunset magazine to provide more professional videos.
New courses on Curious.com
More than that, it's now going to offer courses, or a sequenced bundles of lessons. Fifty of them, on subjects such as learning a language or a musical instrument, are available now. They sell at a discounted price, though in total, they add up to real money--$9 to $49 depending on the size of the course. Students also get some access to teachers.
Indeed, Curious is broadening its money-making plans. Up to now, it has offered free Curious "coins" for people to take the courses, but Kitch said the company now will offer fewer of these promotional coins and let people buy them--with real money, of course.
Curious also is instituting a tip system by which students can send a tip of one, two or five coins if they wish, providing a way to incent teachers to offer more lessons.
Those aren't the end of Curious' monetization efforts. "I don't think we've got it all figured out," Kitch said. He repeated his previous belief that once Curious gets to about a million lesson views a month--it's more than halfway there now--it will have enough of a base of users that he can try out other business plans, such as one-on-one assistance from teachers.
Although the Sunset videos have gotten a lot of attention, Kitch said most of the growth continues to come from individual teachers doing lessons on do-it-yourself plumbling, how to play a ukelele, and the like.
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d50ce17c0ae23fe43357d50bebabd61e
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/02/19/in-one-chart-heres-why-facebook-is-blowing-19-billion-on-whatsapp/
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In One Chart, Here's Why Facebook Is Blowing $19 Billion On WhatsApp
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In One Chart, Here's Why Facebook Is Blowing $19 Billion On WhatsApp
Even in this era of multibillion-dollar valuations for tech startups that have barely moved out of the founders' parents' basement, the idea of Facebook paying $19 billion for a mobile messaging service seems simply insane.
But that's what Facebook likely will be spending to acquire WhatsApp, the latest--well, not even actually the latest--social network and communications service. The company today announced the deal, which includes $12 billion in Facebook stock, $4 billion in cash, and up to $3 billion in restricted Facebook stock units to be granted to WhatsApp founders and employees over a four-year vesting period.
Why so much for a service that a lot of people have never even heard of? Because it's growing really, really fast--faster, in fact, than just about any similar service to date, including Facebook. More than 450 million people are using the service monthly, and 70% of them are active on any given day, according to Facebook's press release. More than 1 million more are registering to use it every day.
Most stunning, WhatsApp messaging volume is apparently approaching the entire worldwide SMS messaging volume of mobile carriers. That's the kind of growth Facebook, whose own messaging service has been growing rapidly but nothing like that, simply can't ignore.
Not least, Facebook now has a valuable piece of real-world information: millions of people's phone numbers. "With the acquisition Facebook has gained access to WhatsApp’s large repository of phone numbers, which was a missing link for Facebook’s user information," Ovum analyst Eden Zoller said in a note. "The access to phone numbers now bridges the offline and online worlds of Facebook users."
Still--$19 billion? Really? Some people thought Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was crazy to offer $3 billion a few months ago for Snapchat, which has even more buzz than WhatsApp especially among the young people the No. 1 social network seems to be losing. If I'm not mistaken, it's more than Google , Microsoft , Apple, or anyone else I can think of has paid for an acquisition. And Google just sold off its biggest acquisition, Motorola. (Well, there was AOL-Time Warner, long ago in Internet time, but you know how that turned out.) "The $19bn price tag is an unfathomable price based on any near-term multiple," Macquarie Securities analyst Ben Schachter said in a note to clients.
It's difficult to put a price on remaining relevant or even surviving long-term, so perhaps $19 billion isn't that big a sum to pay. And it's buying not only younger users, but users around the world. Given that everyone in the U.S. who wants a Facebook account surely has one, the company needs to make sure it goes deep into Europe and Asia if it wants to keep growing--and fulfill Zuckerberg's over-arching goal of connecting everyone in the world.
And after all, it's mostly stock--funny money in a sense. So why not spend it on ensuring a future for your company?
But no, I can't say that with a straight face. It's just too hard to justify it on any kind of near-term factor. Despite Facebook's waning cool factor, the company doesn't seem to be in significant danger. It's one of the most profitable companies in the world at least measured by profit margin.
Investors aren't so sure about the deal either. Shares were down about 3% in after-hours trading, though that's a fairly mild reaction to such a big, surprising deal. Update Feb. 20: Some investors, that is. By the end of the next trading day, shares actually rose 2.3%.
In a note to clients, Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser downgraded Facebook shares to a hold because of share dilution and concern about further deals. Although he likes Zuckerberg's new portfolio approach to apps, he also wonders about the price:
To justify $19bn, WhatsApp would need to generate around $1bn in annual cashflow by our model's terminal year of 2018. However, few data-points to support such an assumption were provided by the company, as evidently few are available. As management indicated, it expects WhatsApp to focus on product and users rather than monetization, anyways. Conceptually, we agree with this notion given the sudden scale that WhatsApp achieved. Still, investors in Facebook will want to justify the valuation of such a transaction. On our own (crude) estimates, if we assumed the product had an average of 1bn users next year and added 100mm per year, with 25% of the user base at that time paying $2/year (we would assume many users will simply never pay, shifting devices and/or services as needed, while those who will pay might be willing to pay more than the current $1/year level), we could arrive at $650mm in revenue. $1bn is possible, but given the optimism already incorporated in a $650mm figure, it might seem a stretch.
Other analysts, such as Sterne Agee's Arvind Bhatia, sounded a more positive tone:
We think the acquisition of WhatsApp is strategically sound and will meaningfully strengthen FB’s already strong mind share on mobile. While monetization will take time, we think the potential size of the user base and strong engagement on WhatsApp should ultimately lead to meaningful monetization.
How? "The real value could be the evolution of the platform to incorporate new functionality such as payments, app distribution, social features, etc.," suggests Schachter. "Near-term, there is also potential for FB to leverage WhatsApp data to help drive improved monetization on other FB products (such as improved ad targeting)."
Still, the fact is that we can't know today whether or not this is a good deal for Facebook. Clearly Zuckerberg sees a big piece of Facebook's future in WhatsApp, because he's paying more than 10% of Facebook's market cap for it, not to mention putting cofounder and CEO Jan Koum on its board. And he can't make many more acquisitions of that size--perhaps any more, at least for awhile--so he knows this one has to count.
In a few years, Zuckerberg may well look smart, if his company ends up even close to as dominant a place for people to share their lives as it is today. It's just hard to justify the deal on anything but faith right now.
Here's what Zuckerberg had to say on a conference call this afternoon:
Our goal is to connect everyone in the world, he says in his usual mantra. To do that, the company has invested in a lot of mobile experiences. We want to develop new mobile experiences beyond the Facebook app.
WhatsApp doesn't get as much attention in the U.S. because it got the most attention outside the U.S. It's the only widely used app that has more engagement than Facebook, he said.
He also cited the successful subscription model it has. Simple, fast, reliable--it's a great model for our own mobile experiences, he said.
Our chat is mostly used to communicate with Facebook friends, and not necessarily in real time, he noted, so WhatsApp is complementary.
Also on the call, Koum said his goal was to provide a service that could be used easily by anyone, no matter what platform. Some 19 billion messages a day are received (and 36 billion sent) using WhatsApp. (OK, so $1 for each message sent today--that's what Facebook's paying.)
In the Q&A session with analysts, the companies provided a little more color on the deal:
Zuckerberg said he and Koum have talked for about two years and that Koum was a "valuable thought partner." Only the Sunday before last, Zuckerberg suggested joining forces. They talked price during the last week and it came together quickly. As announced, WhatsApp will be operated independently, like Facebook's now piddling acquisition Instagram, while getting access to all of Facebook's resources.
How will WhatsApp make money? Not ads, Koum said. (We'll see.) Monetization won't be a priority near-term and, in fact, the company won't reveal how many of those 450 million users are paying $1 a year after the first year of free service. "We're focused on the growth," he said. For his part, Zuckerberg said WhatsApp is headed toward a billion users, and that's always an extremely valuable market in some way or another.
Koum wouldn't talk about other products that might come beyond messaging. Facebook Messenger will continue on its own, since Zuckerberg views it as quite different--only with Facebook friends and often not real-time.
One obvious question didn't get asked: Why is WhatsApp worth $19 billion?
Anyway, Facebook helpfully provided the following chart to explain (if not excuse) why it's willing to part with multiples of its annual sales on a company with 55 employees:
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19b371b310e4e28bcf6e133be995e36d
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/10/no-more-like-baiting-facebook-tries-to-clean-up-your-news-feed/
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No More Like-Baiting: Facebook Tries To Clean Up Your News Feed
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No More Like-Baiting: Facebook Tries To Clean Up Your News Feed
The No. 1 complaint I hear from people on Facebook is that they hate their close friends' posts getting buried in their news feed by stuff they don't care about--the equivalent of spam in their email boxes.
Today, Facebook took steps to fix that situation by targeting several kinds of posts users find spammy. But first, it's important to understand one thing: You won't see any change in the number or type of ads in your news feed. The crackdown on spammy posts doesn't actually include any kind of advertising.
Here, from Facebook's post, is what the crackdown does cover:
Like-baiting “Like-baiting” is when a post explicitly asks News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive. People often respond to posts asking them to take an action, and this means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed. However, when we survey people and ask them to rate the quality of these stories, they report that like-baiting stories are, on average, 15% less relevant than other stories with a comparable number of likes, comments and shares. Over time, these stories lead to a less enjoyable experience of Facebook since they drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about. The improvement we are making today better detects these stories and helps ensure that they are not shown more prominently in News Feed than more relevant stories from friends and other Pages. This update will not impact Pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, and focuses initially on Pages that frequently post explicitly asking for Likes, Comments and Shares. Frequently Circulated Content People and Pages on Facebook frequently reshare great content, but people tell us there are occasionally instances where photos or videos are uploaded to Facebook over and over again. We’ve found that people tend to find these instances of repeated content less relevant, and are more likely to complain about the Pages that frequently post them. We are improving News Feed to de-emphasize these Pages, and our early testing shows that this change causes people to hide 10% fewer stories from Pages overall. Spammy Links Some stories in News Feed use inaccurate language or formatting to try and trick people into clicking through to a website that contains only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads. For instance, often these stories claim to link to a photo album but instead take the viewer to a website with just ads. By measuring how frequently people on Facebook who visit a link choose to like the original post or share that post with their friends, we’ve been able to better detect spammy links. The update we are making today improves News Feed to reduce cases of these spammy links, and in our early testing we’ve seen a 5% increase in people on Facebook clicking on links that take them off of Facebook – this is a big increase in the context of News Feed and is a good sign that people are finding the remaining content in their News Feed more relevant and trustworthy.
None of this means you won't see any posts like this. After all, you probably saw that cute bunny up there in that example because your friends reposted it. Facebook's moves won't entirely erase lapses in your friends' taste, or in yours.
Lest legitimate Facebook publishers and Page owners worry that their legitimate posts will get spiked as well--because that never happens!--Facebook says the vast majority might even see a "very small" increase in news feed distribution.
Bold prediction: A bunch of Page owners will squawk anyway when their traffic drops. But they can't say they weren't warned.
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829b155b049981911ae7ba66e32208e7
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/15/can-ceo-marissa-mayer-ever-get-yahoo-really-growing-again/
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Can CEO Marissa Mayer Ever Get Yahoo Really Growing Again?
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Can CEO Marissa Mayer Ever Get Yahoo Really Growing Again?
Yahoo finally showed a spark of revenue growth for the first time in more than a year in its first quarter. But just barely. And that raises questions anew about whether CEO Marissa Mayer's furious activity since she joined in 2012, from a flurry of acquisitions to layoffs to revamped services, will ever pay off.
Not that the results were disappointing, at least to investors. Indeed, they came in just slightly above expectations, with earnings before certain costs of 38 cents a share on revenues after subtracting commissions paid to partners for Web traffic of $1.074 billion. Analysts tracked by Thomson Reuters had expected a net profit of 37 cents a share on $1.07 billion in revenues.
Investors liked what they saw. After rising 2% today, to $34.21, before earnings were announced after the market close, shares shot up 8% in extended trading. One wonders, however, if that gain came as much from zooming profits at Alibaba, in which Yahoo has a 24% stake, as from Yahoo's own results.
Mayer put as much of a sheen on the earnings as she could. “I am really pleased by our first quarter performance, marking our best Q1 revenue ex-TAC since 2010," she said in a statement that pointed to growth in search revenues. Display ad revenues were flat on a GAAP basis but up 2% "ex-TAC," or minus those traffic acquisition costs. While price per display ad fell about 5%, Yahoo sold 7% more of them. "Q1 was an early and important sign of growth in our core business," she added.
But not much of one. The fact remains that investors' interest in Yahoo, which has been waning this year after hitting a high of $42 in January, comes mainly from the riches expected when China's Alibaba goes public before long. The money Yahoo has already gotten from selling some of its Alibaba shares has helped Mayer on an acquisition spree intended to spark growth in users and, she hopes, some buzz that Yahoo lost long ago.
The problem that eventually will matter to investors is simple: Despite all of Mayer's energetic efforts to restore Yahoo's growth, the signs of improvement remain hazy. Yahoo's share of online ad revenues worldwide fell to 2.9% last year, according to eMarketer, down from 3.40% in 2012, and its share will continue to fall this year by eMarketer's estimates.
Its rivals in advertising, chiefly Google and Facebook, continue to grow fast despite their much larger base of revenues because they've proved to marketers that their advertising works. To put it bluntly, Mayer and her new staff have not yet managed to do the same.
I'll provide some highlights from the conference webcast after it begins at 2 p.m. Pacific. You can also check out the earnings slides.
On the call, Mayer again emphasized what little revenue growth there was, especially a 9% uptick in search revenues but also what she termed a "modest" 2% ex-TAC growth in display. She showed a chart of five stages of growth, putting Yahoo between "stable" and "modest" growth. "Market" growth and strong growth will take years, she said in a rerun (justified as it may be after years of decline and neglect) of earlier promises.
Mobile saw a 15% jump in quarter-over-quarter growth in users, she said. From last year, its 430 daily mobile users are up 30%.
Q1 was the ninth consecutive growth in ex-TAC search revenues, she said, though of course Google continues to dominate.
Communications is another key Yahoo focus. She said Mail still needs improvement, a fact I will second (and third).
Third area of focus: content. Mayer has invested in new editorial talent and new digital magazines. The home page has been revamped as well, with Yahoo offering home-page takeover ads that she said advertisers like. Sports continues to be a rare area of strength for Yahoo, with the Winter Olympics, March Madness, and fantasy sports leading the way.
Yahoo is experimenting with new ad formats that are showing promise, Mayer added. In the quarter, Yahoo introduced a one-stop shop for buying search and so-called native advertising called Gemini, and "motion ads" for brand storytelling. More is coming in ad tech, she promised.
Not least, Mayer said hiring is key--including 300 new engineers in the quarter.
At this point in the call, as Chief Financial Officer Ken Goldman went over the numbers, shares gains after-hours moderated to 6%. The one set of numbers that matters: guidance for the next quarter and 2014. The numbers: GAAP revenue for Q2 of $1.12 billion to $1.16 billion and ex-TAC revenue of $1.06 billion. Non-GAAP operating profit forecast range is $130 million to $170 million.
Mayer added that one of the big successes in advertising is "stream ads," so-called native ads that appear amidst stories on the home page. She also flicked at Tumblr, its $1.1 billion acquisition, which she said is especially successful in getting people to access the service on mobile, and on which Yahoo has recently introduced ads.
Mayer didn't leave much room for the main event of the webcast, the questions from analysts--only 20 minutes left unless they go over the usual hour. A few of the key questions raised:
Q: Is there room for Yahoo to challenge Hulu and everyone else in the market for ad-supported, professionally produced video content? Mayer, who is rumored to have greenlighted several multimillion-dollar Web series, didn't provide a clear answer.
Q: How will the end of the search revenue guarantee from Microsoft in the first quarter hurt revenues? Goldman and Mayer wouldn't say. But Mayer said she sees a huge opportunity in mobile search that hasn't been addressed or even defined yet. That's one of the impetuses behind last year's acquisition of mobile home screen app Aviate.
Q: What are the AdAge 100 top advertisers saying about Yahoo's ad offerings? (Better to ask them, I would think.) Mayer said Yahoo is particularly courting consumer packaged goods companies. Essentially, though, she said she's counting on display ads growing "precipitously" as advertisers move budgets online, in mobile and video, to follow the people there. (But that's still a relatively slow process, and one where others such as Google and Facebook are far ahead.) International growth, which Yahoo hasn't focused on in a big way on the ad side yet, also will be a big focus now, Goldman added. But Mayer later said mobile will be the overriding focus.
Shares settled up about 6.5% by the end of the call at 3:03 p.m. Pacific.
Gallery: Marissa Mayer 27 images View gallery
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a61a12ea0e1c017afcc10fb3390966ca
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/22/look-out-facebook-google-ups-the-ante-on-mobile-app-install-ads/
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Look Out, Facebook: Google Ups The Ante On Mobile App Install Ads
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Look Out, Facebook: Google Ups The Ante On Mobile App Install Ads
Ads that make it easy for people to install apps on their mobile devices became a surprise cash cow for Facebook. The ads reversed the social network's dismal mobile ad situation, which was blamed for helping tank its initial public offering almost two years ago, and prompted rivals such as Twitter and Yahoo recently to announce their own mobile app install ads.
Now, Google has upped the ante, announcing enhancements coming over the next few months to its own version of app install ads introduced a year ago. "From a consumer perspective, people aren't necessarily looking for apps. They're looking for solutions to their problems," Jerry Dischler, vice president of product management for AdWords, said at a livestreamed customer event in Half Moon Bay, Calif. (the archive of which you can view below). To help advertisers provide solutions rather than just point people to apps, Google plans to offer advertisers more ways to run those ads and then prompt people to actually install and use them.
For instance, the ads now will be able to run in search, on Google's display-ad network, and on YouTube using its TrueView format, which allows viewers to skip ads and advertisers to pay only for ads people watched. Ads also will be able to be targeted based on what other apps people have installed on their smartphones and how often they use them. For instance, Dischler wrote in his blog post, "if you exercise regularly and use an app to measure how far you run, you might see an ad for an app that helps you measure the foods you eat and calories consumed."
Also, Google will provide what's known as deep linking, so that if someone does a search for a hotel room, for example, Hotel Tonight can run an ad that links into an app's reservation page if it's installed on that person's phone. Finally, Google is providing app developers with more ways to measure not just app installations but in-app purchases and other app activity.
Ad firms said the mobile app install announcements cement the utility of search as a way for app developers to find and retain users. "We're seeing an escalating war between Google and Facebook on mobile," Matt Ackley, chief marketing officer at digital ad firm Marin Software, said in an interview. Especially with the deep linking, he said, "there's now an opportunity for search to play" more effectively in that game.
"Google is trying to be a trailblazer in the app space – they know apps are where it’s at in mobile, and this positions them at the front of the industry in terms of ad targeting and analytics for mobile apps," Larry Kim, founder and chief technology officer at search marketing firm WordStream, said in an email. "The new app features will make it easier to serve up apps to consumers as well as to increase engagement within those apps."
Generally, Google at the event emphasized the need for marketers to reach people wherever they are. "It’s not really about mobile, it’s about consumers," said Dischler. "It’s no longer about devices, it’s about connecting people to the content they want."
The company also announced better ways to measure conversions, marketing-speak for sales or other actions such as installing an app, on mobile devices and in physical stores. For instance, in one pilot, agency Rimm Kaufman Group did campaign for retailer Express that resulted in a 102% increase in return on ad spend from in-store sales.
In addition, Google promised it would deliver in coming months a couple of new software tools to make it easier to measure the impact of campaigns and to experiment with and test changes to AdWords campaigns.
Here's the video of the event with all the details:
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718b7d0833581431a6c65223a2151d89
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/24/whats-next-for-google-now-that-its-leader-has-suddenly-left/
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What's Next For Google+ Now That Its Leader Has Suddenly Left?
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What's Next For Google+ Now That Its Leader Has Suddenly Left?
Google + has never gotten the respect its creator hoped, let alone gained much ground on its supposed target, Facebook. Now, Google's attempt at a social network has lost its leader and chief evangelist, Vic Gundotra, who announced today that he's leaving Google after almost eight years at the company.
Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive, gave no clue to his next steps. His own post, musing on the death of his wife's uncle and her father's attitude toward life, implied that he was simply ready for a new challenge after a career at Google that you'd have to consider a success. Google+ failed to make a dent in Facebook, but it's a solid service with a loyal following and, probably most of all, a powerful source of data for Google's advertising machine. And Gundotra's previous work courting developers for Android obviously paid off bigtime, as the mobile software remains the only credible rival to Apple's iOS.
Still, Gundotra's departure, effective immediately, is rather abrupt, despite recent rumors that he was interviewing for other jobs. There is speculation that he didn't get along with CEO Larry Page's "L Team" of top execs and with some employees who called him the "Victator," though Page himself provided a quick bit of praise for Gundotra today. Other sources at Google have told me that Gundotra, known for his very public profile and more charm than many Google executives, was resented by some inside Google for self-promotion and a tendency to run over other execs in his drive to get things done.
What matters more going forward is what will happen to Google+, which has suffered most of all from a confusing vision of its core purpose. Gundotra and his lieutenant, Bradley Horowitz (who mysteriously was not chosen as his successor), have taken pains to define Google+ as not a social network, but some sort of social glue for all of Google's services. But their insistence, coupled with iffy numbers of people supposedly using it, always rang a bit hollow, so Google+ continues to be compared to Facebook. And as a place to share your life with friends as people do on Facebook, it's clearly a failure.
Given Gundotra's departure, a shakeup of Google+ and Google's social strategy generally seems almost certain. Already, the group may have been reorganized, according to the Wall Street Journal. That doesn't mean it's dead. For one, Page himself has always been its biggest evangelist and shows little sign of losing interest in it.
Even more, Google+, with 300 million members, is actually a success in a much less public way for Google. Most of those 300 million people may never visit the Google+ site itself, since they're counted merely by signing into any Google service. But by signing in, they provide an invaluable source of data on real people that then can be associated with all their behavior on other Google services. That identification has always been the secret to Facebook's still accelerating success in advertising.
Vic Gundotra (Photo credit: Zoramite)
But the leadership change does mean that Google--in particular David Besbris, a VP of engineering that re/code, which originally broke Gundotra's departure, said would take over Google+ (and which Google just confirmed)-- must find a way to define Google+'s essential purpose. Even Facebook appears to realize its original vision of social networking is nearing a peak, and it's buying up pieces of the future such as WhatsApp and Oculus VR. So at a time when Facebook itself is realizing things have changed, Google would do best to quit trying--even in the backs of its leaders' minds--to become a social network like Facebook.
Here's the thing: This could actually be an ideal time for Google to forge a completely new vision of social networking and communications, rather than keep trying to explain what Google+ isn't. Indeed, at a time when even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is talking up the virtues of private communications, Google+ could position itself as already well on the way to this new world of more nuanced online communications.
That won't be easy for a company that's already a prime target for people worried about incursions into our private lives. But the very architecture of Google+, in particular its Circles feature that allows people to follow others without being forced to become friends with all the freight that carries on Facebook, could be a place to start distinguishing itself in a clearer way.
Then there's Hangouts, the video chat feature that is probably the one bona fide killer app of Google+. They're still way easier to set up, with anyone you want, than Facebook's Skype-powered hybrid. Realizing this, Google has been integrating other services such as Messenger and Google Voice into a fuller-featured Hangouts. There's more opportunity to build on these varied communications capabilities--ideally providing distinct, standalone capabilities rather than trying to corral them all as part of an amorphous Google+ service. (In fact, TechCrunch now reports that's what's likely to happen, though it's surely still in flux.)
It's a stretch to think that after years of continuing to trail behind a raft of surging social networking companies Google+ can suddenly engineer itself into the next InstaFaceApp. It may end up working best for Google if it dumps or at least deemphasizes the tainted Google+ brand in favor of more granular services and apps--as Facebook itself is already starting to do.
Gundotra's departure may be a blow to Google's social ambitions for now. But it also could be an opportunity to start anew. And it's an opportunity Google can't afford to waste this time.
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3aa48ee34212df8bda2bbbd0033129b0
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/04/29/sorry-but-twitter-will-never-be-facebook/
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Sorry, But Twitter Will Never Be Facebook
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Sorry, But Twitter Will Never Be Facebook
So What? It Was Never Supposed To Be
Twitter's shares look to stage another swan dive Wednesday morning as investors continue to focus on the only disappointing piece of data in its first-quarter earnings report: continued anemic user growth.
Higher growth would be better, of course. But the clear implication of an after-hours selloff of 11%, to a little under $38 a share, is that Twitter needs to be more like Facebook: Only by growing like crazy, the thinking goes--Facebook-crazy, that is--can Twitter build the next great online media business.
On that point, investors are utterly wrong. If anything, Twitter needs to make sure it doesn't try to be more like Facebook.
Now, that could well mean that Twitter will never grow to Facebook's size. That would indeed be disappointing to many. When investors bought into Twitter's initial public offering last year and ultimately drove shares to a closing high of $73.31 the day after Christmas, that potential is clearly what they were buying.
But that's their mistake. It's no knock on Twitter as a potentially very successful advertising medium. After all, ad sales more than doubled in the quarter. And with a number of still-nascent ad products waiting in the wings, there's little reason to think that growth--you know, revenue growth--won't continue or even accelerate.
The problem is that most investors and advertisers alike still don't understand that Twitter isn't Facebook and never will be--and that that may very well be a good thing. Craig Elimeliah, a VP and director of creative technology at the ad agency RAPP, said in an interview that most people don't understand the true reach of Twitter, which extends well beyond the Twitter app and website to television, news sites, blogs, and even our culture at large.
"The engagement of a person on Facebook is worth so much less than on Twitter," he says, because Twitter offers in-the-moment context that Facebook can't. "I don't think Twitter is meant to have a billion [actively tweeting] users. It's meant for a highly vocal, highly engaged but smaller group."
Most advertisers, let alone investors, don't get that yet, he adds. That's why Twitter CEO Dick Costolo singled out engagement, more than user growth, in his comments during the earnings conference call. It's also why Twitter is hiring a lot of people, says Elimeliah, who can talk adspeak and understand what advertisers potentially can get out of Twitter. While he thinks the process of articulating Twitter's true value to marketers will take at least a year, he says it's apparent to a few, such as Warby Parker. "I don't even think of it as a social network," he says. "It's a network of people. I see Twitter becoming the mobile Web, the voice of humanity."
Source: WordStream
All that's not to say there's no overlap between Twitter and Facebook. Clearly, there are many, from Twitter's redesigned profile page that resembles those on Facebook to ad formats such as app install ads that both now offer. As each grows and faces threats from other new communications services, they may get more alike yet.
But they will never be identical. Indeed, Twitter may do best to continue emphasizing and better articulating the differences from Facebook. The last thing you want to do as a company is to copy a very successful incumbent.
The big problem for Twitter is tamping down expectations that it's the next Facebook-sized ad medium. Maybe the last couple of quarters helped the company do just that, though clearly not without pain to existing investors. At least at the lower valuation, Twitter's likely less expansive revenue opportunity than Facebook's now offers more upside, as Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser wrote in a pre-earnings note to investors:
We continue to believe that Twitter has a sufficient degree of uniqueness to maintain its user base and that it can attract advertisers without facing most of the commoditization risks that most sellers of digital media inventory endure daily. Twitter’s uniqueness as a medium provides us with confidence that so long as the company continues to evolve its advertising offerings and expand its sales efforts that it can durably grow the business to become one of the larger sellers of digital advertising. Of course, where we have differed with the market’s assessment of the stock price much of the time since its IPO is that we have found it difficult to justify expectations for the revenues needed to back into its valuation. Needless to say, as the stock has fallen back towards our price target of $34 with the sell-off in momentum stocks, it has become increasingly attractive, if still overvalued.
Valuation aside, Wieser makes another good point. Even as it woos more immediate advertising customers with more conventional ad formats, it must continue to develop unique ones that fit the medium so well, and thus produce outsized results, that advertisers feel compelled to use them--which not all of them do just yet:
For Twitter to capture meaningful budget share, advertisers need to be able to make use of what is a different kind of digital platform vs. the dominant alternatives of conventional display-based or search-based advertising on the web. As a distinct platform, advertisers need to have distinct goals that are satisfied uniquely well by Twitter-the-medium for significant budgets to shift from other digital media types. Alternately, there need to be segments of marketers for whom Twitter’s platform is the single best solution at its current scale. We think the kinds of markets where this is most likely to occur will be in relatively mature digital markets.
So no, this won't be a quick process. But again, so what? Only now is Facebook finally considered a core place for advertisers to spend money, and that took a decade.
If Twitter, like Facebook and Google before it, can define for businesses a new way to market and build better relationships with consumers, plenty of money will come. As big as Facebook and Google? Maybe not. But more than enough for everyone to forget that Twitter once was dinged by short-sighted investors for not growing fast enough.
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4c4327ff3ec101334b4561a5b56402df
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/05/28/no-surprise-but-mobile-rules-in-mary-meekers-annual-guide-to-internet-trends/
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No Surprise, But Mobile Rules In Mary Meeker's Annual Guide To Internet Trends
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No Surprise, But Mobile Rules In Mary Meeker's Annual Guide To Internet Trends
If you want to know where the Internet is headed, there are few better guides than Mary Meeker's annual outlook, presented today at the tech site re/code's first Code Conference, the successor to Kara Swisher's and Walt Mossberg's AllThingsD conference. This year, the massive 164-page slide deck, which the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner always runs through at lightning speed, holds perhaps fewer surprises than usual, mostly because one trend rules above all else: mobile.
Even as the number of Internet users overall slows, to less than 10%, the number of people using smartphones continue to rise at a rapid clip, by 20% annually. Actually, the latter is slowing too, but fast growth in China, Brazil, Indonesia, and India are making up for slowdowns in the U.S. and other more developed countries.
And that's just the start. Mobile data traffic is rocketing up 81%, mostly thanks to so many people gluing their eyes to video. As a result, mobile use of the Internet now stands at 25% of the total, up from 14% last year. Fewer and fewer people, it seems, are sitting at a desk staring at what now seems like a big screen compared to those little 4- or 5-inch versions on their phones.
As no one who follows Facebook, Twitter, and Google can miss, mobile ads are taking off too, fulfilling a prediction Meeker made several years ago. They're up 47%, now constituting 11% of total Internet ad revenues, with no sign of a slowdown. Print, she notes, still garners a much larger share of ad dollars than time spent reading paper justifies.
There's a whole lot more on other trends from the proliferation of sensors to rising cyber-threats, in the slide deck, which investors would do well to keep handy on their desktop screens mobile web bookmarks.
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a408da5ad6933fbfa42c6030c689f6a3
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/06/11/the-hashtag-is-the-social-network-crowdchat-launches-group-conversations-for-business/
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The Hashtag Is The Social Network: CrowdChat Launches Group Conversations For Business
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The Hashtag Is The Social Network: CrowdChat Launches Group Conversations For Business
Hashtags, those #wordsorphrases you see at the end of a Twitter message to signal what the tweet is about, have since spread to other social networks such as Facebook, to popular culture including the slang vocabulary of my middle-school daughter's friends ("Hashtag awesome!"), and even to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary starting this year.
Now, hashtags themselves are about to turn into social networks, if a startup called CrowdChat has its way. Since last September, the Palo Alto company has offered a free, public beta service that lets businesses and others set up ad-hoc, real-time group conversations about topics based on hashtags. Today, it's announcing the formal launch of a paid business, CrowdChat Business. "Under each hashtag is an inherent social network," says cofounder and CEO John Furrier, who with cofounders Dani Rayan, the chief technology officer, and David Vellante have been working on the service for the past two years. "Hashtags become the new, universally accessible conversation fabric."
The company also announced $650,000 in seed funding, all angel investors, including an "angel" (that is, small) investment from big venture firm New Enterprise Associates. Furrier, formerly founder and CEO of PodTech.net, is also cofounder and CEO of a group of services--tech news site SiliconANGLE, tech video Webcaster TheCUBE, and consultant community Wikibon--though CrowdChat now looks like his main focus. Onetime IDC executive Vellante cofounded the Wikibon Project, and Rayan is a former engineer at Riot Games and Cloudera.
The crowdchats, a sort of virtual event or meetup organized around a hashtag, are created in what the company calls an "active engagement container" on CrowdChat.com. Each post in that crowdchat is automatically posted to the participant's timeline in Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, depending on which network they're signed into, though the participant can choose not to have it posted.
The posts are appended with the hashtag and a "card" that links back to the CrowdChat conversations. Those tweets and comments then draw more people into the crowdchat, creating a virtual community and a more coherent conversation than one splintered among several social networks. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, yesterday hosted a live conversation on its storage operation. Someone else set up a crowdchat for a Stanley Cup hockey game.
The company is also introducing what it calls a 1-Click Community. CrowdChat can look at a company's or brand's follower and in a click ingest them into its system and spit back out analytics on those followers through a dashboard to understand what they're tweeting about. For now, it's only for Twitter, but Furrier says he'll add Instagram and other networks soon.
These crowdchats are intended to solve a problem with comments on social networks, especially Twitter: You can comment on a tweet, for instance, and see those comments under the tweet if you click on it, but once the conversation starts to take off, comments get splintered among multiple tweets, making a coherent conversation thread impossible. Most recently, that issue was revealed in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's "tweetstorms," or long series of tweets on a topic. They quickly become hard to follow, let alone sustain a conversation about.
Honestly, some of the crowdchats still look like free-for-alls, sometimes pretty disjointed. But at least the comments are in one place and threaded for a little more clarity. They can be embedded in blogs or other websites, and they're also findable on search engines.
CrowdChat isn't entirely alone in what it's doing. TweetChat, for instance, offers discussion centered on hashtags, though CrowdChat claims it has more features.
Although the company will continue to offer a free version of the service, CrowdChat Business will start at $10,000 a year for unlimited crowdchats on one Twitter community and five reserved hashtags, as well as additional features such as access to Twitter's full data "firehose" and a bunch of ways to pull useful data on customers and trends out of that firehose. Indeed, Furrier talks up the big data angle, comparing what CrowdChat is doing to Palantir's use of big-data mining for the NSA and the CIA.
So far, CrowdChat claims seven customers, including EMC, CSC, and Mintigo, plus other users such as IBM. Furrier says the seven-person company, which has an engineering lab in Hyderabad, India, could be cash-flow positive by the first quarter of next year if it gets to 40 paying customers.
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be7b5793e48bc5c1fff167c6f23b1d67
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/06/20/seven-months-after-fda-slapdown-23andme-returns-with-new-health-report-submission/
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Seven Months After FDA Slapdown, 23andMe Returns With New Health Report Submission
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Seven Months After FDA Slapdown, 23andMe Returns With New Health Report Submission
After seven months in the Food and Drug Administration's penalty box, the consumer genetic testing firm 23andMe today took the first step toward getting back in the game of providing health reports in its test results.
The company said today that it has submitted for FDA approval a health report that would provide its customers an assessment of their risk of having Bloom syndrome, a rare inherited disorder associated with short stature and various cancers that often result in death by the mid-20s. The FDA has agreed to accepted the submission, starting a process for a 90-day review period, during which the FDA could come back with more questions and further requirements.
From the blog post this morning:
While we are still in the very early stages of this regulatory review process, we remain committed to transparency and keeping our customers as informed as possible. This by no means is the end of the process even for this one condition. It is likely that 23andMe will hear back from the FDA regarding the material we gave to them, and, we in turn will have to respond to those questions as we move forward. We are pleased to be moving forward with the FDA and committed to our company mission of empowering individuals with their genetic information.
It's 23andMe's first submission of a health report since last November, when the FDA sent 23andMe a scathing warning letter demanding that the company stop marketing its Personal Genome Service. That $99 service gathered people's DNA-laden saliva, ran it through a gene chip from Illumina , and sent back both ancestry information and more than 200 health reports indicating one's risk of getting or carrying the gene mutation for a disease such as cystic fibrosis or breast cancer or their response to drug therapies.
It's the latter, combined with expanded marketing efforts including a planned television ad campaign and a six-month period last year when 23andMe apparently ignored the agency, that prompted the FDA to reiterate its longstanding policy that providing what looks like disease diagnoses made 23andMe's service a medical device. That means it's subject to explicit FDA approval. Other firms such as Counsyl and Pathway Genomics offer genetic tests through doctors, which doesn't require FDA approval.
23andMe worked out an agreement with the FDA to continue selling the test, but only providing raw genetic data and ancestry information, not health reports. Since then, stung by a significant slowdown in new customer signups, the company has been talking constantly to the FDA to craft a new submission that would meet its approval. Backed by Google (cofounded by cofounder and CEO Anne Wojcicki's husband Sergey Brin, from whom she separated last year), Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, and others to the tune of $126 million, 23andMe has also been hiring a number of experienced medical executives, including a chief legal and regulatory Officer, Kathy Hibbs.
23andMe is far from back to where it was before the warning letter, however, when it was signing up tens of thousands of new customers a month for at least one stretch last year. For one thing, this is only one report, far less than the more than 200 health reports it was providing or even the seven it applied for in 2012. The company says it wants to demonstrate that it understands the FDA approval process, and if it gets approval on this report, it would go on to submit more.
However, it first has to get the first one approved, which is likely to take many months if it gets approved at all. Approval also could carry restrictions, especially on diseases such as Alzheimer's or breast cancer that may upset or confuse people. It's possible the FDA might require such tests to go through a doctor or genetic counselor first.
That would be a blow to Wojcicki's vision of providing consumers direct control of their genetic information and by extension their own healthcare. In an interview this week before the submission was announced, she reiterated her determination to avoid undue interference from intermediaries. "We're in this for the long haul," she says.
FDA restrictions also could cause problems for 23andMe's main business model, which is to create a massive database of genetic profiles combined with data from thousands of surveys the company conducts with customers to offer pharmaceutical and academic researchers a way to do clinical trials much faster and more cheaply. If 23andMe is forced to submit reports one by one, it could take a very long time before 23andMe can offer enough health reports to attract the millions of customers Wojcicki wants in order to create a robust database.
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acf7b0533ba9329176051a2ff5c0de64
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/06/25/heres-what-google-is-unveiling-right-now-at-its-io-conference/
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Here's What Google Unveiled At Its I/O Developer Conference
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Here's What Google Unveiled At Its I/O Developer Conference
Updated with analysis and new video.
Google delivered a pretty simple message at its annual confab for software developers, which opened today in San Francisco: Anything you want to do on the Internet, anywhere and on any device, you can do with Google technology. (Subtext: So there, Apple .)
Like Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in this very same building, Google I/O is Google's big show for the year. It's expected to attract 6,000 attendees, chiefly people who create apps and other software on top of Google's Android and Chrome operating systems and its partners' hardware. They're all looking for ways to create better apps more easily, and make more money from them, and hope Google can show them how. (And they expect to get some cool swag, which they did: a smart watch, plus a cardboard version of virtual-reality headset Oculus Rift, which Facebook recently bought for a couple billion bucks. Really. And after trying it, I can say it is indeed awesomely weird, and weirdly awesome.)
Unfortunately, we didn't hear anything from cofounder and CEO Larry Page or cofounder Sergey Brin. Without big introductions of sleek new hardware beyond already expected smart watches from LG and Samsung, the conference was focused more than ever on its core audience of software developers rather than consumers. Also absent at least from the keynote presentations: Google+, the sort-of social network Google has recently appeared to deemphasize, and Google Glass, though the latter occupied a good chunk of real estate elsewhere at the conference. Oh, and that rumor of a TV settop box from the Wall Street Journal yesterday never materialized.
Ellen Huet from Forbes liveblogged the event if you want all the details, so I focused here on the highlights of the new services and products being announced, plus a little context from execs. You can watch the keynote presentations on YouTube, below. If you want the executive summary version, check out the video with Ellen and me at the bottom of the post.
Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Android, Chrome and apps, started the festivities by announcing that Android active users have now topped 1 billion worldwide, up from 530 million a year ago, he says. Tablets are growing a lot as part of that.
First reveal: Android One, a stock Android experience for phones, largely for developing countries where Google wants to reach the next 5 billion users. Launching this fall with three manufacturers in India, starting with a $100 phone with a 4.5-inch screen.
New Android version: Pichai unveils the "L" developer preview. No word yet on what word they will use, such as the rumored Lollipop (Google uses confections for Android names). Android director Matias Duarte outlines some new features, among them providing depth to interfaces so some images can float above others, rich touch feedback, and seamless animations between screens and apps.
User experience: Google has added new animation capabilities, such as "ripple" touch effects, so if you're dialing a phone number, the button ripples like water to show more precisely what's being pressed. Another addition: enhanced notifications, which among other things allow you to read, open, and dismiss messages from the lock screen without having to type in unlock codes all the time. This will be allowed in certain secure situations determined from your location or the presence of a smart watch. The wrapper for these new designs are what Google calls Material, its new design language for the software.
Chrome for Mobile: Avni Shah, director of Chrome product management, says Chrome, the software used in Google's Chromebook notebook computers, also will hew to the Material design thinking. There will be more smooth switching between activities on apps and on the Chrome browser.
Faster apps: This is descending into geekitude, but basically, the mechanism that runs Android is getting speeded up, so apps will run more smoothly. A video showed off smother graphics too. Not least, Google has added tweaks to improve battery life, which of course is never good enough. Project Volta is a collection of features that include more precise battery history analysis and other things that a protester walking up front just drowned out.
Pichai hammers the open-platform angle, which is the same philosophy that Apple CEO Tim Cook recently slammed. Pichai gets a shot in by pointing to some features "other companies" introduced that Android has had for years. Contextual awareness, the ability to use voice to navigate, the ability to pick up activities you started on one device seamlessly on another.
Security and privacy: Android is doing security patches through Google Play and offering a kill switch, among other things.
Wearables: Finally! David Singleton, director of engineering for Android outlines the capabilities of AndroidWear, including the ability to have apps automatically work on square and round screens to allow for more smart watch fashion possibilities. The watch can be always on, with the notification deemed most important at the time and place appearing. Notifications can be swiped away.
You can speak reminders and they will populate services such as your email or calendar. You can also use Android wearables to control other devices nearby; you can tell your phone to play a song, for instance, and what's playing will appear on the watch. There are lots of other contextual examples--automatic reminders of your dinner date, how many steps you've taken, a boarding pass code when you're ready to board a flight, and the like--what Google calls "glanceable cards" that appear on the screen at the right time and place, or so it's hoped.
One problem with all this: The watches these execs are wearing still look pretty big. Too big, I suspect, for most people.
Smart watches: The LG G watch, the device these demos were done on today, will be available to order later today on Google Play. Samsung Gear Live also will be available to order. Motorola's Moto 360 won't be available until later this summer.
AndroidAuto: Google has redesigned Android for cars. Navigation, communication, and music are placed front and center so you don't have to crash before finding them. It's all voice-enabled, too. Basically, we're seeing Google Now, Android's voice-enabled concierge, working in the car. More specifically for the developers, Google is making its AndroidAuto software developer kit available later this year so they can make their own apps. Google's Open Automotive Alliance to push AndroidAuto now has 40 partners from Fiat to Honda, some of which will have cars with the capabilities for sale by year-end.
AndroidTV: No longer a rumor, it's now officially announced, with the intention to bring Android capabilities to the television. Essentially all screens now can use the same software to create apps. Google designed the home "screen," which can float above whatever content is playing, to be a lean-back experience. Apparently Google has finally learned (maybe) that nobody wants to browse the Web on their big screen. Search here is powered by voice, too, so no keyboard or typing, although you can use your smart watch to control things too. As expected, games are a big focus here. You can launch a game to play while you're on your sofa with a game controller.
New Chromecast features: Friends can show what's on their phone on your TV even if they're not using your home WiFi. There's also new "ambient experience" that puts photos from your phone on the TV screen when you're not tuned into a show.
New Chromebook and Android for Enterprise features: Anytime you have your phone near your Chromebook, the latter will sign you in and load your favorite apps. Notifications about your phone, such as it running out of power, can appear automatically on the Chromebook. You'll also be able to run Android apps on your Chromebook. (This would appear to be the start of a long-awaited converging of what are, after all, two different operating systems that both run on mobile devices.) One idea here, Pichai says, is to offer people the ability to run the same apps on both devices while separating user data associated with corporate apps from user data associated with consumer apps.
Google Cloud Platform: A whole bunch of new features that can only be understood by software developers, but essentially you can do programming more easily online.
Google Fit: Thought this health tracking app would never arrive. Ellie Power, Google Play product manager, says Nike Fuel will be publishing its info to the Fit platform. Other partners include Adidas, Intel, and a bunch of others. The software development platform will be available in a few weeks.
And that's it. Here's that executive summary:
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363e909895502f4cb40e167af4aa0aad
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/07/02/mobile-ad-spending-to-blow-past-newspapers-magazines-radio-this-year/
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Mobile Ad Spending To Blow Past Newspapers, Magazines, Radio This Year
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Mobile Ad Spending To Blow Past Newspapers, Magazines, Radio This Year
Revenues from ads running on smartphones and tablets will outstrip those from newspaper, magazine and radio ads for the first time in the U.S. this year, according to a new report from eMarketer.
Mobile ad revenues will jump 83%, to $17.7 billion. That represents almost 10% of all ad spending, as people quickly spend more and more time peering at the smartphones and kicking back with their tablets--a total of two hours and 51 minutes a day, up 32 minutes from just a year ago. Mobile ad spend will trail only that of television commercials, of course, and desktop and laptop ads.
The forecast makes it hard to believe that just two short years ago, Facebook's initial public offering suffered in part because investors weren't sure the company could find a way to make much money on mobile ads. EMarketer estimates that mobile ads on Facebook will hit 68% of its US ad revenues this year, up from 47% last year.
That said, time spent on mobile devices still far outstrips the amount of media spend, so mobile continues to make life a little tougher for the likes of Yahoo and even Google , which can still charge much more for their desktop ads. Google's mobile ad sales will hit less than 37% of its total , though by 2016, that will jump to nearly 66%.
It's no news that print and radio continue to lose ground. But overall, ad spending this year will see its biggest jump in a decade. Thanks to mobile and TV ads, total ad spending will rise 5.3%, eMarketer predicts, the first time it will top 5% since 2004's 6.7% jump. That's a total of just over $180 billion.
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72b73d894108d3abc694290765f166e2
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/10/28/in-bid-to-capture-the-future-facebook-gets-spendy-too-spendy/
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In Bid To Capture The Future, Facebook Gets Spendy. Too Spendy?
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In Bid To Capture The Future, Facebook Gets Spendy. Too Spendy?
At first glance, all the metrics lined up for Facebook's third-quarter earnings: Daily active users hit the mark, mobile daily active users shot up 39%, and ad revenue jumped 64% to hit nearly $3 billion. Just after the earnings announcement, Facebook's shares rose a bit in after-hours trading.
That bit of optimism didn't last long. It soon became apparent that while growth on several fronts was fine, the cost of keeping that growth going--especially years into the future--is going to be much higher than investors expected. The result: Shares began falling, eventually settling out with a 9% drop--only a bit less bad than Twitter's shares fell after its Monday earnings report.
And make no mistake, investors have good reason to be taken aback by the company's spending forecast. Chief Financial Officer David Wehner said costs would jump by as much as 70% next year thanks to investments in Facebook's fast-growing collection of new projects and acquisitions. In particular, he said, a large chunk of spending will go toward hiring for all of Facebook's acquisitions, such as Instagram, messaging phenom WhatsApp, and virtual-reality goggles startup Oculus Rift. More spending will be to staff up products such as the recently relaunched Atlas ad targeting and measurement system, video, and Internet.org, CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pet project to bring Internet connectivity to the rest of the world. "We plan on 2015 being a significant investment year," Wehner said on the earnings conference call with analysts.
And that investment will mean a big acceleration of expenses even from the 41% in the third quarter, when Facebook gained about 1,200 new employees, up 44% from a year ago. A quarter of the new employees come from acquisitions such as WhatsApp and Oculus.
One thing that may have further spooked investors was the long-term nature of some of those spendy projects. Zuckerberg grouped Facebook's priorities into three time frames--the next three years, the next five, and the next 10. The near-term focus is on its existing community and ad business, naturally. Five years out, Instagram, WhatsApp, messaging, and search should come on strong, and Oculus is the big 10-year priority, a bet on what Zuckerberg thinks will be the next computing platform.
That sounds logical, but investors no doubt look at the evident spending on both five-year and 10-year projects now, and figure there's going to be a lot of spending on them between now and then. Zuckerberg, in fact, said Oculus, which is only in prototype mode, would need to reach 50 million to 100 million units before it's "meaningful" as a computer platform, and said that wouldn't happen in the next few years. Even nearer-term products such as Instagram and search, he said, would take awhile. "Products don’t get that interesting until they have about a billion people using them," he said.
One area that investors don't have to worry about, unlike at Google , is the prospect of Facebook making hardware itself--at least beyond the Oculus devices. Although Zuckerberg said Facebook has more skills at hardware than most people realize--it makes its own data centers--he said Facebook sees its main value in software and services.
Apart from the obvious impact of higher expenses on profits, which ultimately informs the stock price, investors may have good reason to worry about higher spending on future products and services that depart from Facebook's social networking roots. After years of investor patience, Amazon.com recently saw its shares hit by investors increasingly concerned about its spending on all manner of products from phones to tablets to video show production.
One good reason for investors' wariness is that despite its dominance of social network ad spending, Facebook still is nowhere near the size of Google. The search giant can spend a lot more than Facebook in absolute dollars on seemingly unrelated, borderline crazy stuff such as self-driving cars, WiFi balloons, and pills to track down cancer cells without unduly freaking out investors.
Facebook? Not so much. Zuckerberg is probably right to invest in long-term projects, because there's no telling how long the social network advertising gravy train will continue. In fact, most analysts are supporting the spending--perhaps one factor in Wednesday morning's more muted reaction. In early trading, shares were down 6%.
"Although guidance should have a negative impact, investors should feel confident that incremental investment should help support sustained growth," Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research wrote in a note to clients. "Comparable investment of the scale that Facebook is contemplating can only be achieved by them or by Google at this point in time, and we see further investment reinforcing their relative dominance in digital advertising for years to come." Likewise, Ben Schachter of Macquarie Securities, thinks the investments are justified given Facebook's "solid fundamentals."
Still, it's clear that not all investors agree. So add this to Zuckerberg's long list of projects: Persuade investors those projects will indeed pay off. That will be a multi-year project as well.
Updated with analyst comment and Wednesday morning stock price.
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37fe7c9c4b93104b6e2c8ceba11dac18
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/11/30/enjoy-those-cyber-monday-sales-next-year-they-may-be-gone/
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Enjoy Those Cyber Monday Sales. Next Year, They May Be Gone
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Enjoy Those Cyber Monday Sales. Next Year, They May Be Gone
For the past three years, the Monday after Thanksgiving has been the biggest online shopping day of the year, and this year will be no exception. Cyber Monday, as online retailers have been calling it since 2005, is expected to see some $2.6 billion in revenues, according to marketing and creative services firm Adobe, as shoppers use their employer's computers and, increasingly, their own phones to shop for deals.
But this may be the swan song for Cyber Monday, whose very name is showing its age as a rallying cry for online retailers. Next year, says Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst for Adobe's Digital Index, Black Friday could surpass Cyber Monday in online sales for the first time.
This year, unless shoppers exited the Thanksgiving weekend more sated than expected, it's likely that Monday's online retail revenues will come out just ahead of Black Friday's $2.4 billion. The only surprise is why mobile shopping, coupled with pretty much universal broadband connections to the home, haven't already done in Cyber Monday.
The reason for its endurance despite its initial few years as a marketing myth: inertia, with a sprinkle of desperation, on the part of online retailers. They've been holding the Cyber Monday party so long that it has taken on a life of its own and they see no reason to send the guests home early. But you already know that from your email box, clogged as it is with pitches beginning with a word that went out of style around 2007.
Already, both Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday are seeing greater growth than Cyber Monday. In findings released Sunday, Adobe said Thanksgiving online sales jumped 25% and Black Friday sales nearly matched that rate with a 24% rise. What's more, mobile drove much of those gains. Some 29% of Thanksgiving sales came from smartphones, up from 21% last year. Black Friday was close behind at 27%.
There's another reason retailers are likely to deemphasize Cyber Monday even more than they have been this year, a short holiday season that drove them to hold a lot of sales all Thanksgiving week. Fact is, the earlier they can get us to shop, the more data they can gather to target more effective marketing in the even more crucial last week or so before Christmas, says Gaffney.
Interestingly, iPhone owners still account for the lion's share of sales revenues--79% vs. Android users' 21%--far out-punching iOS's market-share weight. While that's nothing new, it's a decent bet that the larger new iPhone 6 and 6+ models had something to do with the iPhone continuing to account for most mobile spending.
By the way, if you decided to wait until Monday to get the best deals, you're out of luck. The Monday before Thanksgiving saw the biggest online price drop in a single day, almost 6%. And Thanksgiving Day offered the lowest prices, with an average discount of 25%. Sorry about that, but don't say I didn't warn you.
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3350a9fc0012942c52921f30cd74f686
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/01/14/the-one-big-problem-with-facebooks-mobile-ad-success/
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The One Big Problem With Facebook's Mobile Ad Success
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The One Big Problem With Facebook's Mobile Ad Success
If there's one company that has proved mobile ads work, it's Facebook. Less than two years ago, its newly public shares were languishing thanks to its lack of presence on mobile devices. Today, thanks to CEO Mark Zuckerberg's late but all-out push into the app world, mobile ads constitute a stunning two-thirds of its advertising revenues.
But while the upside of mobile advertising for Facebook is obvious, there's also a downside that means the perennially lower prices of mobile ads relative to ads shown on computer browsers aren't going to change anytime soon: People just don't buy as much online in response to seeing or clicking on ads they see on Facebook's mobile app as they do when they're on their computers.
That persistent problem is apparent once again in a new report out today from Marin Software, which helps big marketers do search and social advertising. According to Marin, while 63% of clicks on Facebook ads came from mobile devices in the fourth quarter, only 34% of "conversions"--purchases and other actions a marketer aims to prompt--happened on smartphones and tablets. That's noticeably worse than search ads, for instance, which displayed a much closer parity betweens clicks and conversions on mobile devices--39% of clicks and 31% of conversions.
The reasons aren't really a mystery. For one, mobile screens remain small despite the growing popularity of larger phones such as the iPhone 6 Plus. People still don't buy stuff, download a white paper, or fill out a mortgage form nearly as much on their mobile devices as they do on their computer browsers, says Matt Ackley, Marin's chief marketing officer.
That doesn't necessarily mean those mobile ads are ineffective, just that it's tough to tell if they prompted people to buy later, on their computer or in a store. And that's the second problem. Until marketers--especially traditional advertisers accustomed to more direct measures of ad effectiveness--can be convinced that a Facebook ad did in fact result in a conversion elsewhere, mobile ad prices are going to stay depressed, or at least not improve enough to match desktop ad prices anytime soon. "The mobile conversion path continues to be less efficient than on the desktop," says Ackley.
For now, it's debatable how much of a downside this relative lack of conversions is for Facebook. For one thing, mobile ad spending is growing so fast that even with lower conversion rates and resulting prices, it's still adding up to healthy revenue growth.
More important, with the notable exception of app install ads, most of Facebook's mobile ads are intended not to spur an immediate purchase but to build awareness for future purchases of everything from steaks to cars. And unless mobile user interfaces improve a heckuva lot, you're never going to buy a car on your phone. That doesn't mean the ads didn't work, just that most commerce continues to happen in the physical world.
All this is why Facebook has insisted for a long time that clicks aren't the point. Not everyone has accepted that argument, but the company has a point: If marketers are looking for branding impact, as they are on television where they spend the majority of their ad dollars, clicks aren't as meaningful as they are with performance-oriented search ads. This is also why Facebook has strived, in particular with a partnership with Datalogix, to prove the impact of its ads on getting consumers into stores and purchasing stuff there.
Still, as obvious as these challenges may be, Facebook hasn't managed to overcome them, and it's going to take awhile, and a lot more research and case studies, to persuade conservative marketers that it's worth paying more for mobile ads. The upshot is that if the growth of mobile ad revenues starts to slow, these issues could come to hurt Facebook. That's why investors will be watching that growth rate very closely when Facebook reports its fourth-quarter earnings on Jan. 28.
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ce031d66724d6af2a671361f6317e54c
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/01/27/apple-pay-starts-to-take-off-leaving-competition-in-the-dust/
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Apple Pay Starts To Take Off, Leaving Competition In The Dust
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Apple Pay Starts To Take Off, Leaving Competition In The Dust
Apple Pay almost got buried in the blowout profits of Apple's first fiscal quarter reported today. But while Apple's new mobile wallet surely won't contribute to those profits anytime soon, if ever, it's clear that new iPhone 6 owners like it. A lot.
During the company's earnings conference call today, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Apple Pay accounts for about $2 of of every $3 spent using mobile-phone contactless payments across Visa , Mastercard, and American Express . "We are more convinced than ever that 2015 will be the year of Apple Pay," Cook said.
Whole Foods, he said, has seen a 400% jump in mobile payments since the October launch of Apple Pay, even though it can accept other mobile payment schemes such as Google Wallet. Panera Bread says Apple Pay is responsible for 80% of its mobile payments. "I'm actually unbelievably shocked, positively shocked at how many merchants were able to implement Apple Pay in the middle of their holiday season," he said.
And more are coming. Apple had announced earlier in the day that USA Technologies would accept Apple Pay at 200,000 self-serve terminals in vending machines, laundromats, and elsewhere. Cook added that he thinks it's the "first inning" of Apple Pay's rollout.
That much is true. It still works only with two iPhone 6 models (and some iPads but only on apps, not in stores). The Apple Watch due to debut in April will enable iPhone 5 models to use it, but that still means no Android phone owners will be able to use it. And it's U.S.-only for now, though Cook implied he wants that to change: “There is not a day that goes by when I don’t get a note from a business outside the U.S. wanting Apple Pay.”
Even more important, the vast majority of stores can't accept it because they don't have terminals that use Near Field Communications radio technology that Apple Pay uses. Stores face an October deadline to upgrade card terminals to accept chip-and-PIN cards or face the prospect of having to accept liability for fraud on card transactions. But while most of those terminals also will have NFC capability, payment experts believe it will be years before most terminals get upgraded.
In response to a question about other features that might be added, such as person-to-person payments such as Venmo provides, Cook hinted that Apple Pay before long will provide more to the wallet. Some retail and payments experts also say it needs to add loyalty programs, for instance. "There's tons of things on our roadmap of adding functionality to it," he said.
Although it's unlikely Apple Pay will become universal even among iPhone users anytime soon, the company is showing clear progress in getting people comfortable with mobile payment.
Gallery: Apple Product Launch: iPhone 6 And Apple Watch 20 images View gallery
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9ba0565069fdc0ac8901c2108493fac1
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/01/29/the-one-missing-ingredient-in-facebooks-drive-for-tv-ad-dollars/
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The One Missing Ingredient In Facebook's All-Out Drive For TV Ad Dollars
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The One Missing Ingredient In Facebook's All-Out Drive For TV Ad Dollars
Beyond plans to spend like crazy on everything from search to virtual reality, Facebook gave investors little to complain about in its fourth-quarter results reported Jan. 28. Ad revenues jumped a stunning 53%, and they would have been five points higher but for currency fluctuations. Mobile ads rose to 69% of those revenues, up from 53% a year ago, a sure sign of the company's progress in making advertising on phones and tablets compelling. Annual revenues blew past $10 billion for the first time.
But investors pay for future profits, so it's important to step back a bit and assess how well Facebook is positioned vs. an always-growing pack of rivals--Snapchat, Pinterest, Google and YouTube, Twitter, and yes, even Yahoo. In particular, it's not yet clear that Facebook has cracked the opportunity for brand advertising, the kind of image ads that dominate television, where most advertising dollars are still spent.
It seems like Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg has been talking about talking to brands for several years now, and she mentioned this once again on the earnings conference call. To her and the ad team's credit, Facebook has made some progress in getting some brand spending to move over to the social network--thanks both to Facebook's nearly unmatched TV-scale audience and a wealth of data that allows for more precise targeting and measurement of results. "The market increasingly understands that we have the biggest mobile platform--people-based marketing at scale," Sandberg said on the earnings call.
Still, brand advertising is clearly still a work in progress at Facebook (otherwise, Sandberg probably wouldn't need to talk it up so much). So what's the problem? One ad agency executive I talked to has an idea, and it involves not only advertising but the reality of Facebook's core service, its news feed.
The issue, says Craig Elimeliah, senior vice president and director of creative technology at RAPP, is that Facebook has saturated its most lucrative audience, the U.S. and to some extent Europe. There's the rest of the world, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the Internet.org effort to get them online is one of Facebook's 10-year projects, not three to five years.
To keep growing--not just audience but time spent on the site, which leads to revenues--Facebook must give people more reasons to use it than they have, Elimeliah says. While Facebook has frequently changed up the look and the algorithms of the news feed, we're still doing basically the same things on it that we have for years: watching a bunch of cat videos, fake news stories from the Onion, and photos from friends. Nothing wrong with all that, but it's pretty passive, especially for a social network in the hyperconnected age of Snapchat.
"They really haven't evolved the engagement on the platform much," says Elimeliah. "There's a lot of noise and clutter." He thinks the rise of Snapchat shows how young people want closer, more immediate interactions with friends, and advertising that works in that context. Indeed, Elimeliah says he's "blown away" by Snapchat Discover, its just-announced content and advertising service. The "low-friction" experience is already getting kudos from media types. "It blows Facebook out of the water from an engagement standpoint," he says, because it fits so well into the intimate and yes, ephemeral Snapchat service.
Now, on the face of it, Facebook doesn't seem to suffer as much as people may think from lack of engagement. Almost two-thirds of monthly users actually visit on a daily basis. But it's no secret that engagement among teens may be on the wane. According to iStrategyLabs, almost 3.3 million U.S. teens users between 13 and 17 have left Facebook since 2011. Clearly that hasn't hurt Facebook much so far, but it's a bit of a canary in the coal mine, indicating Facebook could be losing touch with the next generation.
The brand advertising issue may end up getting at least partly solved on its own. Facebook is making a big push into video ads, but it has been rolling them out slowly to avoid annoying Facebook users. The idea is that as those users start to post more of their own videos, instead of mostly photos, video ads will look more natural in the news feed. "We want the ads to blend into the consumer experience," Sandberg says. And video ads will be plenty appealing to brands, whose marketers and agencies already know how to create them, even if they have to take into account the smaller screens and shorter attention spans on mobile devices.
Still, Facebook needs to make sure it provides the right context for those ads--a place where ads not only seem natural but play in a context that isn't quite as noisy and distracting as the current news feed. Video ads also seem unlikely to be effective unless they are made to be consumed on the go and provide actionable information--so they can't be simply downsized TV spots. "I don't know if the Facebook platform can make that kind of change," Elimeliah says. Indeed, Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser wrote in a note to clients that Facebook may need a new venue for these ads: "While management did not convey that it believed it necessarily required premium content to capture more video ad spending, our guess is new initiatives (perhaps a video portal akin to YouTube or Vimeo) may eventually emerge to help monetize inventory beyond existing sales activities."
Of course, Facebook also has Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, each of which could provide different experiences for various kinds of brands and brand messages. There's also the Facebook Audience Network, which can run Facebook ads on many other mobile apps. If Facebook can offer advertisers a unified way to reach all those users and target them with the differentiated messages that will work for each of them, it might just get those brand dollars it has been craving for years.
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4e4bad15ef46d5b6164c54b79d336243
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/02/19/in-big-shift-fda-plans-to-let-23andme-market-genetic-tests-to-consumers/
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In Big Shift, FDA Plans To Let 23andMe Market Genetic Tests To Consumers
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In Big Shift, FDA Plans To Let 23andMe Market Genetic Tests To Consumers
More than a year after the Food and Drug Administration barred 23andMe from marketing a broad-based genetic testing service, it looks like the FDA plans to shift gears and allow such tests to be sold directly to consumers.
The announcement came in a release late Thursday from the regulator that said it's authorizing 23andMe to market a specific test to consumers for Bloom Syndrome, a rare inherited disorder associated with short stature and various cancers that often result in death by the mid-20s. The genetic testing company had submitted the test for FDA approval last June.
But the agency then proceeded to lay out broader plans for reversing its stance on direct-to-consumer tests to screen for genetic carriers of diseases. Until now, the FDA had treated such tests as medical devices, which required a much longer and more rigorous approval process for each disease test. Now, the agency says it's willing to allow these tests to be sold without specific FDA approval. The move is specifically for autosomal recessive diseases that a person who may display no symptoms of the disorder could pass along to offspring.
It's not yet clear how sweeping the FDA's move is, and it may not happen all that soon. It still needs to come out with a specific notice of what it intends to require, which will be followed by a 30-day public comment period and then implementation. In a blog post, CEO Anne Wojcicki called the Bloom Syndrome test approval "an important first step [her emphasis] in fulfilling our commitment to return genetic health reports to consumers in the US."
She also told Bloomberg that she expected to be able to sell the company's test with some health analysis later this year, with health reports updated as 23andMe gets more approvals for other disease analysis. In a release, the company added, "23andMe will not immediately begin returning Bloom syndrome Carrier Status test results or other health results to customers until it completes the regulatory process for additional test reports and can offer a more comprehensive product offering."
Still, it's not yet clear that 23andMe can sell its genetic tests for as wide a variety of diseases all at once as it once did, according to FDA press officer Jennifer Dooren, reached late tonight. The Mountain View-based company, funded partly by Google , previously had provided risk levels for a wide variety of diseases based on the presence of gene mutations.
That's what caused the FDA to crack down with a scathing warning letter in 2013 demanding that the company stop marketing its Personal Genome Service. The $99 service gathered people’s DNA-laden saliva in "spit kits," ran it through a gene chip from Illumina, and sent back both ancestry information and more than 200 health reports. The latter indicated one’s risk of getting or carrying the gene mutation for a disease such as cystic fibrosis or breast cancer or their response to drug therapies.
Dooren said 23andMe likely would not be allowed to resume providing risks of breast cancer and other diseases all at once. "It doesn't open it up to the broader test," Dooren said of the announcement. "It's not opening up the floodgates."
It is, however, a clear sign that the FDA has decided that with proper procedures and information, consumers should be able to buy the tests at least for specific diseases without having to go to a doctor or genetic testing service at much greater cost. From the release:
“The FDA believes that in many circumstances it is not necessary for consumers to go through a licensed practitioner to have direct access to their personal genetic information. Today’s authorization and accompanying classification, along with FDA’s intent to exempt these devices from FDA premarket review, supports innovation and will ultimately benefit consumers,” said Alberto Gutierrez, Ph.D., director of the Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “These tests have the potential to provide people with information about possible mutations in their genes that could be passed on to their children.”
The FDA provided several requirements for the tests to be sold over-the-counter:
Like other home-use tests for medical purposes, the FDA requires the results to be conveyed in a way that consumers can understand and use. This is the same approach the FDA has taken with other over-the-counter consumer products such as pregnancy, cholesterol and HIV tests for home use. While the FDA is not limiting who should or should not use these tests, it is requiring that the company explain to the consumer in the product labeling what the results might mean for prospective parents interested in seeing if they carry a genetic disorder. If sold over the counter, the FDA is also requiring 23andMe to provide information to consumers about how to obtain access to a board-certified clinical molecular geneticist or equivalent to assist in pre- and post-test counseling.
It also laid out how 23andMe got approval for the Bloom Syndrome test, providing a regulatory framework for the way a genetic testing company needs to do to sell these tests directly to consumers (and 23andMe itself provided more detail on its work in its press release):
23andMe performed two separate studies to demonstrate that their test is accurate in detecting Bloom syndrome carrier status. One study conducted at two laboratories tested a total of 123 samples, including samples from known carriers of the disease. An additional study evaluated 105 samples at two additional laboratories. Both studies showed equivalent results in detecting carrier status of Bloom syndrome when the same samples were tested. The company also conducted a usability study with 295 people not familiar with the 23andMe saliva collection device to demonstrate consumers could understand the test instructions and collect an adequate saliva sample. Finally, the company conducted a user study of 302 randomly recruited participants representing the U.S. general population in age, gender, race and education level to show the test instructions and results were easy to follow and understand.
Despite the uncertainties, this looks like a big win for 23andMe and for consumer access to low-cost genetic tests.
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7647d34eb308f4c8ec71c4f7b813f408
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/04/21/why-googles-mobilegeddon-isnt-the-end-of-the-world-for-most-websites/
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Why Google's Mobilegeddon Isn't The End Of The World For Most Websites
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Why Google's Mobilegeddon Isn't The End Of The World For Most Websites
Mobilegeddon has arrived, and the very nickname says everything you need to know about concerns over Google's new formula for showing search results on smartphones, which launches today.
Overblown concerns, that is.
Online publishers are understandably worried about Google's new mobile-friendly algorithm, which will provide a boost to websites that look good on smartphones while penalizing those that don't. The change could have a potentially huge impact and raises a lot of worries that many sites will disappear from Google's results on smartphones (results on desktops and tablets aren't affected, nor are search ads). Even many large companies' sites aren't ready and many small businesses have too many other things to contend with besides yet another website project.
But the fact is that Mobilegeddon needn't be a big deal for most sites and marketers. For one, Google is providing a test to see if sites look good on smartphones, as well as a FAQ on the implications. It's pretty straightforward, and anecdotally, it doesn't appear to take much for a site to be ready. My own severely neglected personal website, for instance, passes Google's test easily.
Also, mobile-friendliness won't be the sole factor in determining search result placement, so especially for large sites that are relevant for a particular search term in other ways, the change may not be all that large even for mobile-unfriendly sites.
And unlike previous Google algorithm changes, these aren't aimed at elevating or downgrading entire sites. Rather, any individual pages that look OK on a smartphone will rank the same as before, and they won't be affected by other pages on the site that don't look good. "I don't think this is the end of the world for most folks," says Matt Ackley, chief marketing officer at the ad technology firm Marin Software.
Indeed, Ackley says most small businesses' sites can be easily made mobile-ready in "under a minute," using services such as Duda Mobile's that start at $60 a year. "It's really not that hard," he says.
So why all the talk about "mobilegeddon"? For one, because it's catchy, especially for news outlets that don't know SEO from SEM and probably can't even define what an algorithm is. They get traffic, at least if their mobile sites don't suck.
For another, it's an opportunity for a lot of search marketing companies to make hay while the sun's shining on what is after all a significant change in how Google presents its iconic search results. You want a mobile-ready site, laggard marketer? We can do it for you yesterday. Just sign this purchase order.
Not least, Google itself surely loves all the attention given to this change. Not the public-policy folks there, who must worry that it reinforces the notion of Google's dominance at a time when it's under unprecedented pressure from antitrust regulators. But the emergence of a catchy term for what Google has been telling websites for years now--that they need to go mobile or go home--could pay off big time for the search giant.
Mobile ad prices remain far below those of desktop search ads partly because what searchers do after they tap on an ad is tough to track, but also because once they do tap on a search result, they're often sent to a site that looks terrible on their phone. Then they go somewhere else. Same deal on ads, and advertisers aren't willing to pay as much for ads that don't produce results, even if it's their own lame site's fault. So advertisers instead try ads on Facebook, which has seen mobile ad revenue skyrocket in the past year.
Better mobile websites are likely to lead to more "conversions," whether that's purchases or visits to a physical store. That's why Google ad folks must be overjoyed at all the attention on the algorithm change, even if the nickname doesn't thrill them. "It's awareness-raising on the part of Google," says Ackley. Among several of Google's carrot-and-stick initiatives intended to help marketers dive into the mobile era, he says, "this one is the stick."
And so far, it's working.
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6e6a2f33fb1743cdb05f033a2a79f8a3
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/06/11/vc-investments-pour-into-virtual-reality-startups-but-payoff-looks-distant/
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VC Investments Pour Into Virtual Reality Startups, But Payoff Looks Distant
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VC Investments Pour Into Virtual Reality Startups, But Payoff Looks Distant
Virtual reality may be the hot thing in technology today--one of the hot things, anyway--thanks to glitzy products like Facebook-owned Oculus Rift head-mounted display and Google -backed Magic Leap. But investors will have a long time to wait before they get a payoff.
That's the conclusion of several venture capitalists who spoke at the Augmented World Expo conference Wednesday in Silicon Valley. And that's saying something, because these are the VCs who are putting their money into dozens of VR and related augmented reality startups, not those sitting it out for now.
Among the most aggressive is likely to be Boost VC, a startup accelerator in San Mateo, Calif. Founder and CEO Adam Draper, he of the storied Draper family of VCs, recently made VR one of the firm's two investment pillars. (The other is Bitcoin, where it has made about 50 investments--they really don't want a quick return, do they?) "There's a lot of flow of money happening," Draper said, similar to Bitcoin a few years ago.
The Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headsets have seized the fancy of the fashion world even before... [+] their public release, and investors are noticing. (Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images)
But VR, at least the latest burst of interest in what is a nearly 50-year-old field, has not yet hit the trough of disappointment. "We're in a virtual reality excitement bubble," Draper said, but it's not just hype. "Everything is getting so much better so much faster."
Rothenberg Ventures in San Francisco started investing in VR about a year and a half ago after investment director Dylan Flinn "fell in love" with the developer version of the Oculus Rift. "We see VR as the next evolution of human-computer interaction, said Flinn, whose firm has invested in AltspaceVR, which is creating a social VR platform, and 3D modeling startup Matterport.
Despite the enthusiasm, to a person the VCs said the payoff on their investments won't come anytime soon. "Never before has a technology gotten so much attention before actually getting to consumers," said Alexander Taussig, a partner at Highland Capital, which has investment in motion controller firm Leap Motion, cinematic VR firm Jaunt, and Rethink Robotics. Even Nabeel Hyatt, venture partner at Oculus investor Spark Capital, said that after almost two years of very public testing, Oculus Rift is "still not something my mother would know about if we hadn't invested. Basically there's no user base. You have to have a pretty long view on these companies."
How long? At least two to three years, said Flinn (and that seems somewhat optimistic). One reason is that the hardware doesn't have mass appeal yet, not least because some of the most prominent products such as those from Oculus and Magic Leap aren't even released yet. "The No. 1 thing Oculus doesn't want to do is ship a headset that makes everyone sick," Taussig said, referring to the nausea common to the use of at least early VR gear.
Another reason: There's no really compelling content for VR yet, whether that be games, movies, social interaction, or still-to-be-determined experiences. In another panel at the conference, on VR content prospects, it was apparent that even VR studios are still searching for the magic formula. "No one knows how to tell a story in immersive entertainment," said Ben Miller, director of content development at WEVR, a VR studio in Venice, Calif. "There's lots of spectacle but I can’t name one great story in VR."
That's why the VCs told the large number of VR and AR developers in the audience to focus less on raising money than experimenting. "It's OK to be a hobbyist," said Hyatt. "Just go out and build rather than try to sell a VC who only knows what he read in TechCrunch."
Already, some VR opportunities looked played out--mainly hardware such as head-mounted displays, now that Facebook, Google, Sony , Microsoft and other giants have staked their claims. (And Oculus on Thursday announced plans for its consumer version to be released next year.) "It's very hard for a startup to build an end-to-end display platform," said Taussig. Added Taussig, "Don't take money from VCs who aren't prepared to wait" a few years for results.
But a lot of opportunities remain, such as easier-to-use content creation and data visualization tools and software for eye tracking, gaze input, and voice placement. And on the content side, brands are clearly interested in the marketing possibilities, Miller said.
Not least, Draper has said he wants to create a real-life Iron Man suit. As VCs like to say, it's good to have a stretch goal.
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b171d97fb118e9580740171362edd7d9
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/07/28/twitter-temp-ceo-jack-dorsey-sure-doesnt-talk-like-a-temp/
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Twitter Temp CEO Jack Dorsey Sure Doesn't Talk Like A Temp
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Twitter Temp CEO Jack Dorsey Sure Doesn't Talk Like A Temp
Twitter CEO-for-now Jack Dorsey (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
On a wild day when investors couldn't figure out whether they loved or hated Twitter's second-quarter earnings, one thing was clear: Jack Dorsey is in charge.
At least for now. But during a blunt earnings conference call also broadcast on Twitter's Periscope app, Dorsey sounded as if he'd really like to do the job much longer.
Dorsey, the temporary Twitter CEO who's also CEO of soon-to-go-public Square, isn't expected to get the permanent nod for the top job. Current speculation centers mostly on two people. One is Adam Bain, president of global revenue and partnerships, who can boast a better-than-expected performance on the advertising revenue front this past quarter as well as the undying love of the entire ad industry. The other is fast-rising Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto.
Nonetheless, Dorsey sure sounded like an owner, not just a temporarily returning cofounder, throughout the earnings call. Plainly laying out how recent user growth initiatives haven't worked, he said, "This is unacceptable and we’re not happy about it."
That comment aside, he often used "I" rather than the usual "we" to indicate what Twitter needs and plans to do in order to fix the various issues that have slowed Twitter's user growth, which is the key reason investors quickly knocked its share down more than 11% in extended trading after an initial 5% bump. Indeed, according to a number of accounts, most recently a piece by Recode's Kara Swisher, Dorsey really wants the job, even if it seems impossible to everyone but Dorsey that anyone could be CEO of two very busy companies at the same time for very long.
Dorsey sounded pretty convincing on the vision thing as well, a key area where former CEO Dick Costolo was seen as lacking. Twitter, he said, should be "as easy as looking out your window to see what’s happening," before anyone else, straight from the source, and updated throughout the day. He also said it has to continue to be "the most powerful microphone in the world." If the company succeeds, he said, "Twitter will be the first place people turn to see what’s happening today."
Even more to the point, he sounded like he's firmly taking the reins, outlining a number of moves that normally would be up to someone who's going to stick around in a top operating role for a long time to come. In particular, he said he is "entirely focused on building the best team," meaning an executive team. Problem is, a new CEO, especially in the continuing possibility of an outside candidate, usually wants to form her own team. If Dorsey's mainly forming that team, what sort of CEO besides the two execs often mentioned is going to take that job?
More than that, Dorsey outlined reasonably specific steps Twitter will take to restore user growth. Although those steps, such as improving the user experience and communicating why people should want to use Twitter, have been laid out generally before, Dorsey displayed a firm grasp of both their importance and his intention to make them happen. His intention, not "our" intention or the board's intention.
Perhaps we shouldn't read too much into his almost brutally honest assessment of Twitter and where it needs to go. He and everyone else at Twitter realizes they need to lay it out for investors, in particular the great amount of work and time needed to turn Twitter's growth around. That doesn't mean Dorsey will be the one to carry it all out.
But whatever title Dorsey ends up with, it's clear that he intends to drive Twitter's future. "I’ve never been more sure of the value Twitter brings to our world," he said at the close of the earnings call. And, it seems, never more sure that he's the guy to prove it.
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cee73a821d4f351f4498cd8e7c9e82ee
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/07/29/as-mobile-video-ads-soar-at-facebook-big-brands-pile-in/
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As Mobile Video Ads Soar At Facebook, Big Brands Pile In
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As Mobile Video Ads Soar At Facebook, Big Brands Pile In
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
Facebook's second-quarter results today didn't thrill investors, who knocked shares down more than 3% in after-hours trading. They don't like to hear about an 82% jump in expenses to get revenue growth of half that much--even less so when Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of the social network, says that spending won't slow down much anytime soon.
But advertisers were a different story--in particular, big brand advertisers like Procter & Gamble and Under Armour that are looking to reach people via the mobile devices they carry with them all the time. Mobile ad revenues shot up 74% from a year ago, considerably faster than ads overall, which rose 55% after taking out currency impacts, and it's now 76% of ad revenue.
In particular, Facebook is starting to become a must-buy for big brands that still spend the most on television, because it has the reach and the impact they want. Now, according to ad agency executives, they think Facebook is finally poised to capture more TV ad dollars that Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg has spent years pursuing.
"We see Facebook at a core pivot point," says David Hewitt, VP and mobile lead at the digital agency SapientNitro. "It's now a safe bet to put a lot of money into."
In the last six to eight months, he says, brands have started to understand the reach Facebook has among smartphone users--some 844 million people each day. "It's hard to get reach on mobile," he says, but now "Facebook checks that box" in a way that few others online besides Google can.
Another reason is that Facebook can run those ads in a lot of places besides just Facebook. Now that the company is operating a number of other distinct apps, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and its own Messenger app, advertisers have a wider choice of places to reach a broader range of audiences in unique ways. It also can run Facebook ads on other sites that are part of its Audience Network.
Not least, advertisers like what Facebook is doing with video. In video ads that play automatically in people's central news feeds, they have a format they know people watch (and that commands much higher prices for Facebook). "There's an amazing amount of upside to video," says Hewitt, enough to overcome what he calls "muscle-memory media buying" by big brands. Already, a few brands are crafting campaigns. At the Cannes Lions festival last month, Sandberg noted, some of the winners included Under Armour’s “I will what I want” created with the agency Droga5 and Procter and Gamble’s “Like a Girl” created with Leo Burnett.
What's more, Facebook is pitching advertisers on the ability to buy ads using the same measures they use for TV ads, according to a recent report. Indeed, the ability to measure the impact of its ads on product sales is another big reason Facebook has attracted advertising's biggest spenders. One example Sandberg cited: Acura used Facebook video to launch the TLX, then showed "retargeting" ads when people who saw the video went elsewhere online. Using a Facebook service called Conversion Lift, she said, Acura could prove the ads drove car sales.
For now, image advertising like on television is still likely a small part of spending on Facebook. Let's not forget that a large chunk of Facebook's mobile ad revenues still come from app install ads, which prompt people to download an app--more of a classic direct-response ad than the image ads brands favor on television and other media. But even app install ads are attracting big brands such as HBO too, according to Sandberg.
Facebook isn't alone in its pursuit of brand advertisers. "Google, for example, is rapidly building out audience targeting options, and has a ‘little' video network of its own—YouTube—that is massively successful for advertisers and very effective on mobile,” says Craig Palli, chief strategy officer at the mobile marketing technology firm Fiksu.
So far, though, Facebook appears to be more than holding its own.
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6a7b8b42d061cca8409b780ac8b2fdb4
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/08/18/in-conversation-stripe-ceo-patrick-collison-on-the-limitless-potential-of-payments/?sh=65ebfe1126a1
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In Conversation: Stripe CEO Patrick Collison On The Limitless Potential Of Payments
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In Conversation: Stripe CEO Patrick Collison On The Limitless Potential Of Payments
When Patrick Collison and his younger brother John were developing ideas in 2010 for new apps to create, they kept running into a seemingly basic problem: Even as it was getting easier to tap cloud services to create startups faster and cheaper than ever, one thing was still a pain in the app: accepting payments online from customers.
So the pair, already entrepreneurs from Ireland who sold their first company in their teens for $5 million, decided to turn that problem into a business. They set up a system that allowed developers to add a few lines of code to their app and start taking payments from anyone anywhere, for a small fee per transaction.
Today, their company, Stripe, processes billions of dollars a year for tens of thousands of companies, from other startups to the likes of Facebook , Salesforce, and Lyft. With a recent funding from Visa and other partners such as Apple and China’s Alibaba , Stripe is now valued at $5 billion. But CEO Patrick Collison and the company’s investors alike think that’s only the start. Hemant Taneja of investor General Catalyst says that when Stripe reached its first $1 million in transactions processed, the elder Collison said, “Only five orders of magnitude left.”
Taneja thinks Stripe indeed could be valued at $100 billion in the next few years if it plays its cards right. Just as Google turned search into an advertising empire and Amazon’s Web Services enabled the creation of many thousands of online businesses, he says, “There’s an opportunity for someone to create a platform that’s all about payments and commerce.”
It’s a heady possibility for someone who still hasn’t turned 27 years old, and who faces competitors from PayPal and Google to big banks. In an interview I conducted with Patrick Collison for a story in MIT Technology Review’s annual list of Innovators Under 35, the Stripe CEO had a sore throat, so he spoke softly, in a distinct if muted accent befitting his upbringing in Ireland's Shannon region.
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But his ambition--and a firm belief that Stripe and the sometimes controversial startups it enables are good for society--were apparent as we talked on a balmy late June afternoon at Stripe headquarters, a 106-year-old trunk factory in San Francisco’s Mission District. Following is an edited version of our conversation:
Q: What spurred your interest in technology early on?
A: I grew up in very rural Ireland. The Internet was kind of a connection to the greater world. It had a lot of significance. Maybe if I grew up in New York, I'd have already felt it. It was very clear if you grew up in the middle of Ireland just how potent a force the Internet was and could be. I was always seduced by the potency of computers and the possibilities for which they could be leveraged.
Q: When did you and John realize you needed what Stripe now provides, and when did you realize it could be a business?
A: We started working on it as a side project, while I was at MIT, and just being baffled at how convoluted and awkward this appeared to be. It seemed like a prevailing ecosystem designed to reduce the number of Internet businesses.
Q: Even with the existence of PayPal, for example?
A: The problem with PayPal and all of those [other online payment companies] is that they're built for person-to-person, consumer payments. Businesses generally want complete control of the infrastructure themselves that fit properly with their product and experience and so forth. Especially as mobile devices came along and they wanted frictionless billing in the background. I suspect PayPal would have solved this had they not been acquired and had that stultification for so long not taken place. Speaking as a developer, PayPal did not solve our problem.
So we just started working on it as a side project to see what a solution might look like and whether we could actually build something. Then six months later as we worked on it, in the summer of 2010, we came to see it less as a solution for people like us, i.e. independent developers who had little tolerance for overhead and complexity, and more as this much broader pillar of Internet infrastructure. It wasn't just broken for us, it was broken for medium-sized businesses, it was broken for large businesses, it was broken for businesses outside the U.S., it was broken for consumers.
The same way that Google exists as a foundational component of the Internet around information retrieval, it felt like there should be such a foundational component for economic infrastructure, and that was sorely lacking.
Q: You got a lot of pushback from financial services companies, didn't you?
A: Many people told us that it wouldn't and couldn't work.
Q: Because they didn't want it to work, or because they really believed it couldn't work?
A: People in general aren't that rigorous in their thinking. Things that are substantially different to how the world works today, their default not unreasonably is to believe that they're not possible. It's not unreasonable because most of them aren't. But a subset of those are actually good ideas.
Q: Did you get discouraged at any point?
A: We certainly got discouraged. We believed it was necessary/important for some people. We didn't appreciate just how broadly it would resonate and how quickly it would do so. We didn't actually realize how quickly the finance industry would embrace it. To their credit, before we launched, Wells Fargo decided to work with us, American Express decided to work with us. Since we launched, many other financial institutions have. So the finance industry has gotten the memo on the importance of technology.
Q: What's the essential technology or approach you brought?
A: It's no one thing. People keep looking for the proverbial secret sauce. What's the secret sauce of Facebook or of an Apple product? It's the whole system and the design of the complete experience.
It requires a ton of smart technology behind the scenes to make it happen. How do you handle the compliance, risk, fraud, identity verification, all of those things behind the scenes while providing a seamless experience for the user. We have a 10-person machine learning team that works on these problems. It comes down to the details. You can view every request that you send to the Stripe API [Application Programming Interface]. There's a ton of infrastructural database and distributed system work that has to be done in order to make that experience possible.
But I think the secret sauce is more in the techniques we bring to bear on solving the problem, i.e. solving them through technology, and on the outlook, in terms of empowering other developers and builders. And that was quite unprecedented, because our competitors were finance companies. They weren't even in the same industry.
Q: So as Marc Andreessen says, software is eating the world, in this case finance.
A: Pretty much.
Q: What’s the larger goal for Stripe beyond beyond a slick user interface for enabling app payments?
A: It is enabling and accelerating the Internet economy as a whole, increasing the GDP of the Internet. When you think about the sum total of the cornucopia of services, businesses, websites, apps that have become possible over the last 20 years and what remains to be built over the coming decades, the value thus far is enormous, it's transformative. We see Stripe as a fundamental component in enabling and accelerating that.
By reducing the barriers to starting an online business, some of those businesses are going to become hugely impactful, hugely transformative, and that's a very good thing for the world. Even the businesses that don't become the famous multibillion-dollar household names will be a big deal for some number of customers and they'll certainly be a big deal for the people who start them.
Q: What were some of the issues involved in online payments that you needed to solve?
A: Things like even mature companies wouldn't sell to customers outside the U.S. in their home currencies. They didn't do things like automatically update their cards when they changed, so they would churn through their user based much more quickly. Their operations were still paper-based, like chargebacks mailed to them from the bank, they have a department of people responding to and dealing with them.
[Amazon.com CEO] Jeff Bezos has the compelling analogy of electricity generation when he talks about Amazon Web Services. In the early days of electricity, everyone had to have their own power station. It's clearly so much more efficient to the world if you can aggregate and centralize that expertise and provide electricity as a utility, a service. Similarly, we want to provide the best commerce and payments infrastructure to any business--Amazon-class payments infrastructure without customers having to incur all the cost and complexity of building it themselves.
Q: In some cases, you’re enabling new business models to work, right?
A: Part of what's so compelling about these technology companies online is that they're doing things that people haven't done before: crowdfunding, a completely new thing. Or mobile marketplaces: Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Instacart, DoorDash, Shyp. It's easy to dismiss a lot of these services as a convenience, but they enable more people in society to take advantage of these services. My youngest brother is disabled and for him, it's not a convenience. He can now do grocery shopping in a way that he could not before.
Q: You’ve also talked about speeding up globalization of businesses.
A: The promise of the Internet is around this transcendence of physical geography. To a large degree, the Internet has delivered on that promise, but when it comes to the movement of money and the ability to start and operate a business or needing to purchase from a business, it really hasn't. You have this Balkanized landscape of European Internet companies and American Internet companies and Chinese Internet companies and so forth. You or I because we're here can really easily start an online business, but somebody in Peru or Indonesia or India cannot. That should not be acceptable to us.
Q: Has Stripe itself already enabled some businesses to exist that probably wouldn't otherwise?
A: We hear it from them regularly. I would hate to definitely claim credit, but two weeks ago, I was talking to a company that's the biggest education platform in South America, and they said they would not exist if it weren't for Stripe. The value of making it so easy to start participating in the online economy actually has a far larger effect than one might a priori imagine.
Q: Do you feel you are helping to create net increased value in the economy over time, not just enabling short-term disruption that often seems to bring with it the loss of jobs?
A: We are unapologetic technology optimists. The anti-disruption case is logically flawed in any number of ways. We presumably believe that most of the technological progress over the arc of humanity to date has been good. I don't see any argument to go back to 1600. So the argument has to be, "Everything we've done so far has been good, but suddenly we've magically passed some cosmic threshold where now it's bad."
Q: Some very smart people are saying just that, that we're seeing a different employment situation this time.
A: I think it is self-evidently preposterous. Take Uber. I've lived in San Francisco for many years. I was here before Uber. Getting a taxi in San Francisco was incredibly difficult. It's now possible for people like me, for the elderly, the disabled, to reliably transport themselves around the city. This is a huge improvement. You could barely book a taxi to go to the airport in San Francisco before Uber.
I also disagree with the jobs angle. That gets at a very pessimistic view of humanity. It is true that automation is replacing a lot of manual repetitive jobs. But to believe that that's bad requires believing that there aren't better, more interesting, more valuable things that these people could be doing. I don't believe that. Driving a car all day is not a super-complicated or super-rewarding cognitive task. I hope we can take advantage of all the technology and automation and elimination of basic, menial tasks to go and enable people to pursue the things that they would actually like to spend their time on.
Q: So you’re saying Stripe could enable the disruption of Uber or Lyft, too.
A: I'm sure in many cases we will provide the tools to enable the disruption of many of the other businesses. But every time I take Lyft, it's generally a source of extra income, something they do while they're pursuing something else. One has a crowdfunding campaign for a new kind of motorcycle valve, another just moved back from Hawaii and getting back on her feet so she can then pursue an arts degree. By having jobs take such a flexible form, it enables people to be more aggressive and take some bigger career risks because there's more of a reliable floor. And just looking historically, taking the portfolio of all Internet businesses built since the dawn of the Internet, they've been wildly good for the world.
Q: Does Stripe have a moat? Did you have one from the start because of this different approach, or has it developed over time with all that work that was done, or because of network effects?
A: We don't love talking about our moats. But in general, there's nobody else even trying to build the same kind of unified platform from start to finish. The traditional strategy has generally been to do this in an unbundled way, to have gateways and processors and payment instruments and banks, and you assemble them yourself. Our strategy is the best product comes from a unification of the whole thing, by building a really powerful foundation and enabling additional services on top, fundamentally geared around this thesis of empowering the developer. That strategy is highly differentiated in the industry.
Q: Even from, say, Braintree, which looks the closest to Stripe?
A: Sure. As a subsidiary of PayPal, their goal is around bolstering and protecting the PayPal consumer brand, furthering the adoption of PayPal consumer accounts. So the strategic misalignment between PayPal and the business now becomes quite significant. The optimal user experience is probably to have no payment experience at all, or if a payment credential is required, to pay with whatever's the most convenient, such as AliPay, Android Pay, Apple Pay. But if your goal is to drive adoption of PayPal accounts, that now becomes much more problematic.
Q: So you're not too worried about competition?
A: No.
Q: What are you worried about?
A: We're paranoid about lots of things. Seriously, we're paranoid of the feeling of ever resting on our laurels.
Q: You're still a pretty small company in terms of people--230 or so. Is that really an issue?
A: I think it's always an issue. Especially if you're lucky to be successful. We're always less successful than we'd like to be. The flip side of an attitude of perfectionism is there's always an infinitely long list of things to be dissatisfied by. There's always a bit of an adjustment for new people joining the company. From the outside, maybe they thought Stripe was pretty good. And we want to make clear to them that for whatever we might have done well thus far, the vast majority of what we'd like to do is yet to be done. Even of the things we've done thus far, they're only a tenth as good as they should be.
Q: Do you have a particular approach to address that dissatisfaction or to address the need to keep innovating on that 90% that you say is still to go?
A: I don't think there's any one way to do it, or if there is, I haven't discovered it yet. We hire people who enjoy the idea of building important, fundamental infrastructure. What we talk about internally is continual improvement and perpetual dissatisfaction. We want people who are committed to doing great work, which sounds like a platitude, but is actually fairly hard to find.
At most companies an attitude of good enough tends to seep in. It has to be enforced through some sort of cultural norm. It can't just be a management dictum. Culture is gardening, not architecture. It's thousands of small interventions and comments and small details and observations and changes.
Q: Is there a general direction you want to go that may not be apparent from Stripe’s trajectory right now?
A: We're not going to significantly change direction, so in that sense, no. There's lots still to do in terms of what we're focused on today. We like to remind people that 2% of all spending in the world takes place on the Internet today. Stripe is a small fraction of that 2%. So if our goal is to enrich the Internet ecosystem to empower and accelerate this technological progress, we still have a vastly long way to go. If we want to be the agent that turns that 2% into 5%, 10%, 20%, we're barely off the starting blocks.
Maybe if we're having this conversation in a couple years and Stripe has helped power the next quadrupling or 10Xing of online commerce, maybe then we'll start to turn our sights a little bit further afield. The binding theme has decades left in it.
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c3b1d72d1eaba5122ccf40bc3032befd
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/08/27/for-ai-startups-the-best-of-times-the-worst-of-times/
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For AI Startups, The Best Of Times, The Worst Of Times
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For AI Startups, The Best Of Times, The Worst Of Times
It's a great time to be a startup in artificial intelligence. It's also a hard time to be a startup in artificial intelligence.
So it goes with startups in hot tech markets all the time, but AI is especially hot these days, thanks to big breakthroughs that have been applied to improve speech and image recognition. That's making for lots of new opportunities, and lots of competition for those opportunities
Not surprisingly, a panel of AI startups (plus one somewhat older company called IBM ) at the research institute SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., focused on the positive, but fortunately, some of us journalists forced them to reveal the downsides too. The panel was presented by the tech forum Churchill Club on Aug. 26.
Besides the ready availability of capital, one upside for AI startups is that they have access to huge pools of computing power (such as Sentient's network) they never did before. As a result, startups can credibly attack real problems, and not necessarily have to create their own Google-scale networks of computers. "You can solve not just the cartoon version of a problem, but the real version of the problem," said Nigel Duffy, chief technology officer at Sentient Technologies.
And there are plenty of problems to solve, otherwise known as opportunities to exploit. Many go well beyond well-known areas such as speech and image recognition or even robots and autonomous cars such as Google's. Lauri Saft, VP of IBM's Watson Ecosystem & Partner Program, said IBM expected mainstream applications such as banking would be the obvious target for Watson's AI work, but quickly found interest in fields as diverse as veterinary medicine and fantasy sports.
Another potent opportunity could be software. "A lot of what we build is held together by handwritten software," said Adam Cheyer, cofounder and VP of engineering at Viv. "AI can play a huge role in becoming more assistive in handling the problems of creating software."
There's also a rush to provide intelligent assistants, such as the one Facebook announced yesterday--and the one that Viv, still in stealth-ish mode, looks to be building. Better natural language understanding will be a big part of what enables those, said Kevin Quennesson, an engineering manager and staff engineer at Twitter Cortex, the company's AI group. And the list of AI-driven business opportunities for startups goes on: drug discovery, e-commerce, education.
The downside of the current gold rush? Mainly competition, especially for talent. And especially from big companies with virtually unlimited money, such as Google and Facebook that are vacuuming up AI scientists like crazy. The entrepreneurs tried valiantly to point out that there are advantages to working at a startup, such as the potential to work on problems too far-out for established companies (though Google certainly works on its share of those). "Breakthroughs are best done at a startup," said Cheyer. "At a startup, you can count the number of days before you die," which provides a "unique focus." But Norman Winarsky, an advisor to SRI's venture arm (which spawned Siri, later bought by Apple), pointed out the obvious: "It's hard to recruit people from great companies."
The biggest challenge for AI startups is resisting the urge to take what is after all a set of technologies with very broad applications too broad. The key, said Winarsky, is focusing on single opportunities first where AI technology is uniquely applicable, rather than trying to create a broad AI platform. The latter is more likely to be dominated by huge companies such as Google and IBM, he said: "If you're going to climb Mount Everest, you gotta have a base camp first."
Of course, there's an upside to competition as well for startups. Those that are successful can sell out to the big guys for a whole lot of money. That possibility may be driving venture investment as much as the core opportunities, but again, that's how the tech startup world works.
By the way, these folks aren't too worried about the two constant elephants in the AI room: the potential for AI to eliminate a lot of people's jobs, and the potential for AI to eliminate people altogether. On the job front, they think AI will mostly serve to augment humans rather than replacing them in large numbers. "Companies are using this as an assistant, a colleague," said IBM's Saft. "This will empower more people, like to write software," added Quennesson, who said AI thus could reduce the divide between technology haves and have-nots.
As for the Terminator/Skynet threat? Cheyer insisted that it's no more likely to happen than aliens attacking us. "We'll be hit by asteroids, more likely," he said reassuringly.
|
d689d4a74f702b77bf5b9dbc8a42af57
|
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/08/the-one-killer-feature-apple-tv-needs-isnt-ready-yet/
|
The One Killer Feature Apple TV Needs Is Still Missing
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The One Killer Feature Apple TV Needs Is Still Missing
Apple CEO Tim Cook (Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)
As the new Apple TV video streamer debuts today, it is still missing the one key feature it needs to become a must-have device: TV programs and movies all its own.
The new version of Apple's not-quite-a-hobby-anymore looks to be a major improvement over the existing hockey puck. It has a new remote control with a touchpad that will make Apple TV good for gaming, as well as voice control using Siri and an app store so other developers of games, video apps, and more can offer additional reasons to buy the device.
But most important, according to various reports, one most recently in Variety, Apple is currently exploring anew how it might boost Apple TV's prospects by entering the growing fray in original video programming. Earlier, there were persistent reports that Apple would offer a Internet-based bundle of existing TV programming. But it's believed that rights issues and a reluctance by programmers and networks to endanger their cash cows have stalled that service. "Original programming is the only solution to Apple's biggest problem in the video world--that is, that nobody wants to sell Apple content rights," says Forrester analyst James McQuivey.
Either way, it's clear that Apple has designs on its own bundle of programming, especially programming no one else has, to drive more interest in all its devices. And now Apple TV may loom more important in that effort than it has so far. A stronger Apple move into television and online video is long overdue, but instead of the television set many people had expected for years, it appears that for now Apple TV is the horse the company plans to continue riding.
The challenge for Apple is that its rivals have galloped ahead of Apple TV, which hasn't changed much in three years. Roku already offers voice control, for instance. Microsoft's Xbox, which can stream video services, is already a long-established gaming console, of course. Amazon offers some original programming, though it's not clear how much that's driving sales of its FireTV streaming stick and Amazon is likely more interested in driving more people to buy its $99 Prime shopping membership that offers its shows free.
In any case, Apple TV is falling behind in more than just features. Recent data shows Apple TV falling to fourth in sales behind Roku as well as Google's Chromecast and Amazon's FireTV, though that's in part because of those devices' lower prices. Apple overall has sold the most--25 million according to Apple CEO Tim Cook--with Roku a likely No. 2 at 10 million sold. (Amazon and Google don't disclose sales figures.)
Given Apple TV's solid but unspectacular base, original programming would offer the last piece that help recharge it into the home hub that Apple appears to want it to become. And the appeal of marquee programming you can't get anywhere else is growing. Some 38% of U.S. Netflix subscribers today, for instance, say at least half of what they watch on the service is original to Netflix, such as House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black. That's up from 24% in early 2014, according to data from RBC Capital Markets.
Another reason for the original programming imperative is a surprising shift by young video viewers back to the television set. Some studies indicate a steady migration away from the TV to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, though it remains the single most-watched device among all age groups. But according to a new study by Adobe, which tracks video viewing online, younger viewers are moving back to the TV, thanks to devices such as Apple TV, which saw a 10% rise in users in the second quarter from previous three months. At least among those Gen Z viewers, says Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst for the Adobe Digital Index, "viewing is strongly going away from iPads to connected TV devices" such as Apple TV.
Apple clearly hopes for a broader appeal for Apple TV, and original programming would be a big part of that. But any deals to buy it and certainly any effort to take an active hand in creating it are unlikely to happen soon. Reports indicate that while Apple is hiring executives to staff the operation, it would take at least until early next year to get underway. And as Netflix and Amazon learned, it takes years to get shows produced, let alone produce hits.
Even if the prospects for Apple original programming are remote for now, it may be able to do the next best thing until it can go original: Give people a way to find any content they want wherever it resides. C'mon, it's 2015, and we're still thumbing in searches for shows letter by letter on the remote? Yes, we are.
That's why the rumor that Apple will introduce a new system for finding video wherever it resides is promising, both for viewers and for Apple. The company reportedly will offer the ability to search across both iTunes and other video streaming services to find the shows you're looking for, and to do so via voice using Siri.
What's more, an Apple TV app store could provide a temporary workaround for the lack of content deals. HBO, CBS, and others have shown they're willing to allow people to view their content, for a price. Some might even break ranks to offer free access to some shows to make sure they have a presence on an Apple product. The more sources are available on Apple TV through a growing number of apps, the more indispensable it will look to consumers on the fence.
Still, original programming remains the key piece. And it's not yet clear Apple, a leader in hardware and software design but not a leader in the creation of entertainment itself, can pull it off. "Can Apple play the game? Absolutely," says online TV veteran and serial entrepreneur Jeremy Toeman, a former Sling Media exec who's currently vice president of products at CNET. "Is it in their DNA? Don't know."
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c6ead334af369b6840f5cb6ffade8583
|
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/22/pingpad-a-new-social-network-for-getting-things-done/
|
Pingpad: A New Social Network For Getting Things Done
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Pingpad: A New Social Network For Getting Things Done
Pingpad cofounder and CEO Ross Mayfield
There’s no lack of apps to communicate and collaborate with friends, family and colleagues. You use messaging apps such as Snapchat, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger to ping friends, and maybe team collaboration darling Slack at work. You’ve got document sharing apps and services such as Google Docs, Quip or Microsoft Office Mobile, Dropbox for storing files, maybe Evernote for quick notes, and oh-so-many calendars for your job, your family, and your kids' soccer teams. And of course there’s still email.
Whew. And therein lies the problem, says Ross Mayfield. The 44-year-old serial entrepreneur knows collaborative software, having co-founded Socialtext in 2002 to commercialize the seminal group-edited Web pages called wikis. Now, he believes that precisely because of the explosion of communications, collaboration, and productivity apps since then, there’s a need for a much more simple way to bring them all together. When Mayfield and his future wife were planning their wedding, for instance, he needed to use a wide array of apps and Web services to keep track of catering and location options, as well as arrange activities such as a wishing tree that required help from friends. The scattered nature of all those tools made it difficult for multiple people to use, especially on the go.
Today, Mayfield’s year-old startup, Pingpad, is launching a free app on Apple’s and Google’s app stores and a connected service on the Web that aims to elevate messaging into a way for people to get things done--and not just at work. Unlike at Socialtext and largely unlike most collaboration services all the way from Lotus Notes to Yammer to Slack, the nine-person company isn’t chiefly aimed at businesses. “We had a lot of innovation around collaboration in the 2000s,” he said in an interview in the makeshift upstairs office at his newly rented house near downtown Palo Alto. "But very little of it reached consumers."
Pingpad is intended to be a tool as simple and quick for anyone to use as messaging: a lightweight social network for getting things done all in one place. The app, which was still undergoing changes last week, features several categories of services, starting with the simple act of creating a note. Notes can be private or shared with particular contacts, who can be added with an email address or mobile phone number, so they can jointly edit the notes.
Groups of contacts also can be formed quickly. Each group also has a chat channel to discuss notes and share links (and eventually photos), and the chat messages can be saved as notes as well, making them less ephemeral than in most messaging apps. Finally, tasks can be assigned to group members. Mayfield calls the result “social productivity.”
Besides big events like weddings, Pingpad could be used to help people coordinate household chores, schedule errands, arrange carpools, plan vacations, host potluck dinners, and the like. One likely target is colleges, where the app would be useful for sharing class notes, coordinating study groups, arranging roommate tasks and movie nights, and serving as a hub for clubs and organizations. And although it’s not focused on big enterprises, Mayfield thinks Pingpad could attract workgroups or departments inside smaller companies.
Pingpad represents a change in the nature of online productivity and collaboration applications that’s developing as the mobile age matures. Many services and apps still have documents at the center of their services, a concept that retains the baggage of paper documents such as difficulty in group editing and formatting that makes viewing on mobile devices cumbersome. As messaging of various kinds has begun to replace email as the prime way to collaborate especially on mobile devices, Mayfield contends, the document will give way to quick messages that also can be saved, shared, and edited simply.
Already, messaging has started to become something of an atomic unit of many kinds of apps. Even non-messaging apps such as Uber, Instagram, Meerkat, Facebook, and Twitter are appealing in part because they have short messages at their core to make their services quick and easy to use. That has some experts comparing the impact of messaging to that of operating systems such as Microsoft’s Windows that serve as platforms for many applications. "We see messaging as the new OS--all sorts of activity will happen inside of it," says Marc Canter, co-founder of Cola, a messaging startup not quite ready to announce its service.
One big challenge faced by all new social apps is the cold start problem. They require people to find other people to use them before they become useful. This is why you probably don’t use WhatsApp if you’re older than 35: None of your friends do either. It’s also why Pingpad is aimed at first helping individuals create notes and lists for themselves, so it’s useful immediately even if friends or colleagues aren’t using it yet.
Mayfield is hopeful that if and when people do get others to use Pingpad, they will discover another benefit of the app: Discrete groups can be set up from among a single list of contacts, avoiding the need to set up and organize contacts in countless apps. “Being able to have identities that work across boundaries, which is increasingly how we work and live, is incredibly valuable,” says social software consultant Thomas Vander Wal, who has tried out Pingpad.
The wide range of potential uses puts Pingpad in competition at least superficially with parts of nearly every other app for communications and collaboration. But even if they're constantly invading each other's territory, most have fairly distinct purposes. Facebook and WhatsApp are more about casual chatter, not getting something done. Apps aimed at businesses, such as Slack and Yammer, work great for discussion but not for direct collaborative work on a document or task. And document editing apps such as Google Docs are overkill for many simple tasks.
Still, more direct competition may be coming. The file sharing service Box is adding collaboration tools, and on Monday, Drew Houston, CEO of file storage service Dropbox, signaled an intention to create more of a complete collaboration platform. "We think about how do we remove friction from all these everyday things you’re doing," Houston said. At the same conference in San Francisco where Houston spoke, TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup called SamePage unveiled an app and Web service that allows people to combine a wide array of other services such as Google Docs and Box with chat all on one page. “The collaboration problem is not yet solved,” says SamePage CEO Scott Schreiman. The upshot, says Brian Blau, research director at Gartner: “There’s going to be lots of these kinds of apps.”
Pingpad has raised about $1 million in a seed financing round from 500 Startups, CrunchFund, Greylock Partners, Floodgate Fund, and a raft of angel investors. Eventually, Mayfield plans to make money from add-on services such as greater data storage and more tools to manage groups. For now, though, the priority is proving that even in a world bursting with social apps, people still need a better way to collaborate not just at their job but in the rest of their life.
|
7de24def13e3ee9f4f50882990871157
|
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/10/27/the-one-somewhat-bright-spot-for-embattled-twitter-advertising/
|
The One Somewhat Bright Spot For Embattled Twitter: Advertising
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The One Somewhat Bright Spot For Embattled Twitter: Advertising
On a day when Twitter's stock got hammered in after-hours trading, it's hard to find a bright spot for the embattled company. But if there is one, it would be advertising.
It's certainly not user growth, which rose only 8 percent from a year ago--the slowest yet, and one of the big reasons shares fell 13 percent in trading after the market close. That was the key takeaway in Twitter's third-quarter results reported today.
And even on the advertising front, the news wasn't all good. In particular, Twitter's revenue guidance for the fourth quarter came in substantially below what analysts had been forecasting, though comments from Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto on the conference call for analysts implied the company is being conservative about what is customarily a very strong December.
But while Twitter's main focus remains getting more users and getting them to use Twitter more often, the bottom line ultimately is how much advertising revenues Twitter can generate. And few investors were complaining about the 60 percent jump in ad revenues, to $513 million. It would have been 67 percent if not for currency exchange rate changes. "Overall, the existing platform remains sufficiently differentiated and valuable to a sufficiently large group of advertisers," Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group, wrote in a note to clients. "We think investors should focus on the company’s revenue enhancement initiatives such as the growing use of video units" and other advertising opportunities.
Today, Twitter cited a raft of other promising signs around advertising, among them:
* Advertisers like Twitter's new auto-play video ads. Because Twitter imposed a relatively strict standard for viewability of video ads--100 percent of the ad must be in view for at least three seconds for advertisers to pay for them--marketers saw an 84 percent drop in the cost per view of video ads. Video completions also rose by seven times. Although such reductions might seem to be a negative for Twitter, they get a lot more advertisers to shift budgets from other kinds of advertising online. And it's worth noting that video ads generally command higher prices than other kinds of display ads. "Video in particular this past quarter was a huge driver," said Twitter Chief Operating Officer Adam Bain.
* More video ad inventory is about to open up. Starting this quarter, Twitter will launch Promoted Moments that it started testing in the third quarter. That's a paid ad that looks like and appears in Moments, a feature introduced in early October that lists events rather than an endless list of reverse-chronology tweets from people you follow.
* Twitter now has more than 100,000 active advertisers. That's a result of a recent focus on getting small and medium-sized businesses to advertise. Industrywide, they account for 60 percent of display advertising and a large proportion of search ads as well. But Twitter said it's aiming to get millions of smaller advertisers by approaching the 9 million businesses that are Twitter users.
* New ad targeting options for events are working. Bain cited an example of media buying agency Mindshare seeing a 73 percent to 110 percent lift in ad engagement as a result of the new options.
* Twitter's selling more ads off Twitter.com itself. Some $66 million of Twitter's $515 million in third-quarter ad revenues came from ads placed in other apps through its MoPub mobile ad network. That's up from 8 percent in the second quarter and just 2 percent a year ago. This isn't entirely a positive, though, because Twitter must pay its partner apps and websites for the traffic, so profit margins on these ads are much smaller.
* Overall, ad engagements rose 165 percent thanks to auto-play video and off-Twitter ads. As a result, Noto said, average cost per ad engagement fell 39 percent from a year ago as a result, another attractive development for advertisers.
The fourth quarter also will see a pilot program launching for Twitter's deal with Google announced last April to enable advertisers to buy Twitter's Promoted Tweets from inside Google's dominant DoubleClick display-ad buying system. "There is a set of advertisers that will only spend inside DoubleClick," Bain said. Another pilot ad program, for "dynamic ads retargeting," also will launch this quarter. Not least, Twitter will run ads tonight on the World Series--that one at the top of the page.
For all that, the muted fourth-quarter guidance points to continued challenges. Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Graham lowered his price target from $40 to $38, saying the weak outlook signals a "lack of visibility on the advertiser front that is troubling given typical seasonal strength." In particular, ad sales on Twitter.com aren't growing as fast as before, and lower-margin off-Twitter sales aren't likely to make up for that.
And Twitter still has a lot to do in order to attract more of its advertisers' budgets. One key thing advertisers want, Bain said, is the ability to measure the results of their advertising, especially inside the Twitter app. To date, most media measurement firms haven't offered much in the way of in-app measurement tools.
Bain thinks better measurement will show the attractiveness of Twitter advertising. He cited Datalogix, which helps marketers tie online advertising to sales in stores, as saying that Twitter's return on ad spending is double that of traditional display ads. That's not a high bar, but if Twitter can capture some of the billions of dollars spent annually on display ads--and that's still a big if--its advertising business could see higher growth in years to come.
|
89dcb2e0b4ad9f9134ee582cfcb5acad
|
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/11/04/this-number-in-facebooks-q3-earnings-should-scare-tv-networks/
|
This Number In Facebook's Q3 Earnings Should Scare TV Networks
|
This Number In Facebook's Q3 Earnings Should Scare TV Networks
Eight billion.
That's how many videos people watch on Facebook every day, according to company comments after it reported third-quarter earnings today--and it's double the number just seven months ago. More than anything--Facebook's 45% ad revenue growth notwithstanding--that's why companies that make their money on television advertising should be worried.
Granted, it's easy to put too much stock into even a figure as eye-popping as 8 billion a day. Facebook counts any videos watched for as little as three seconds. And nearly all those videos are nothing like television shows or movies. Instead, they're short videos of your child's first steps along with trailers for actual shows and movies. So this is not yet prime-time advertising as brand marketers think of it.
But what the 8 billion daily video views shows is that Facebook has arrived as a place where people are happy to watch videos of almost any kind--some 500 million people daily, in fact. Not only that, they're doing so on the mobile devices where advertisers know they need to reach people--especially the younger people with disposable income--who have begun drifting away from linear television.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also driving the company to make video easier to upload, watch, and make money from. It has added live video to its Mentions app for public figures, started supporting 360-degree videos in the news feed, and begun testing a dedicated videos section. "Over the next few years video is going to be the most engaging content online, and by continuing to innovate here we have a chance to build the best place to watch and share video," Zuckerberg said in prepared comments on its quarterly conference call today.
What that means is that people on Facebook will now view video ads, the most lucrative kind of ad online or off, as a natural if not universally loved complement to the videos they're already watching. At some point, ad spending on television--still the largest single place for marketers' budgets--seems bound to shift at least in part to video ads. Facebook event recently debuted a measurement it calls Target Rating Point to provide a similar metric for buying video ads on Facebook the same way as on TV.
For the time being, advertisers are using video ads on Facebook to complement their TV brand campaigns. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg noted one example: GMC used video and other ads on Facebook to extend the reach of their TV ads for trucks and SUVs. According to Sandberg, the Facebook campaign lifted ad recall by 13 percentage points and brand favorability by six points.
The big hole in Facebook's video ad strategy, of course, is compelling long-form content such as movies and TV shows. It's a long way from getting that, and it hasn't indicated how it intends to get studios and other content creators to go along. But it recently has offered a business model for it, which is a share of revenue from videos it hosts, like it just started to do for publishers with its Instant Articles.
Facebook also needs to provide a better way for people to find video they want to watch. It's trying out Suggested Videos to surface videos people are likely to want to watch, but it will need more than that to rival YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and many others.
But it's clear that Facebook is now a force to be reckoned with in video advertising, something that seemed unthinkable just a couple of years ago.
|
3729088372e31fa0ed9caee21bc9c0f9
|
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/11/10/pandora-eyes-offline-mode-for-its-music-service/
|
Pandora Eyes Offline Mode For Its Music Service
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Pandora Eyes Offline Mode For Its Music Service
Despite the widespread and growing popularity of the streaming music service Pandora, it faces one big obstacle: If you’re offline, you’re out of luck.
But it’s clear that Pandora wants to fix that situation, especially since rivals such as Spotify and Apple Music have ways you can listen offline. Today at the M1 Summit mobile conference in San Francisco, a Pandora executive’s comments suggested that the company is seriously considering an offline mode.
The comments came in response to a question posed to several mobile companies on a panel, including Pandora and the mobile sports ticket service Gametime. “It’s something we’re looking at,” said Lisa Sullivan-Cross, vice president of growth marketing at Pandora. “It’s on our minds.”
Asked after the panel for more details, Sullivan-Cross declined to add much. “We know our customers want it,” she told Forbes. “I don’t know if or when.”
It’s not as if Pandora is losing much if any ground to rivals for the lack of an offline mode. Neither Apple Music nor Spotify make it easy to listen to songs when you’re offline. In fact, it’s quite complex. And Pandora has continued to offer other improvements, including new ways to find music introduced last week.
Still, the company needs a boost. Competition from the likes of Apple Music and even Alphabet, the holding company for Google, is taking a toll on Pandora. Its shares are down about 45% on the year, though for other reasons as well as competition. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple Music has amassed more than 15 million members. And a new subscription service from Alphabet, YouTube Red, includes a free subscription to Google Play Music.
But while an offline mode might make Pandora relatively more attractive, it won’t be easy to implement. The biggest obstacle is that music labels almost certainly would demand that Pandora pay an additional license fee for the privilege. And it's not clear the cost would be worth it to Pandora, which has clashed repeatedly with labels and some artists over royalties. Or the labels may not want to allow it at all, or at least impose restrictions that make it as difficult to use as on other services.
Pandora faces another obstacle too: Its business model is still mostly built on advertising. And offline, it’s difficult to run ads--and impossible to serve them in real time, which increases their relevance and thus their value.
So despite Pandora’s evident desire to give customers the offline access they want, don’t look for it to arrive anytime soon.
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