Posts tagged Ready
Less Than 10% Of The Web In 2012 Is Mobile Ready
Feb 20th
Mobile’s overall share of Web traffic in the United States has increased to about 9% (according to StatCounter) which is also the same percentage of Quantcast’s Top Million sites that are deemed ready for mobile in 2012 according to data from the Mongoose Metrics Data Series. Since…
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Pinterest Isn’t Ready to Focus on Making Money
Feb 16th
Pinterest is no longer using Skimlinks, the company that provided a way to monetize affiliate links and actually make some money.
CEO Ben Silbermann got in touch with Josh Davis of LL Social, the site that spread news of Pinterest’s use of Skimlinks’ affiliate links. Of their conversation, Davis writes that Silberman…”indicated that the use of Skimlinks was a test, not a business plan, and that Pinterest had stopped using Skimlinks a week before I wrote the original story on the subject.”
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So if Pinterest had already stopped working with Skimlinks a week before this story came out, why did Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro go into depth about Pinterest’s use of affiliate links? Here’s a quote from the original story:
With respect to FTC rules on disclosure of affiliate links, the law is that any content creator that is *endorsing* or *recommending* something and obtaining financial benefit as a result of this endorsement, needs to disclose it. In this case, Pinterest are not pushing people to buy something because they get paid for it, they provide a platform that drives traffic to retailers and they are being rewarded for providing that service.
Pinterest also added a new question to its help page about how the company makes money. In short, Pinterest doesn’t make any money, nor is it trying to right now. It is only focused on growing the site right now, and is taking investments from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
“We’ve tested a few different approaches to making money such as affiliate links. We might also try adding advertisements, but we haven’t done this yet. Even though making money isn’t our top priority right now, it is a long term goal. After all, we want Pinterest to be here to stay!”
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The Mobile Patent Wars: Are we Ready for This to go Thermonuclear?
Feb 15th
Everybody is armed, forces are deployed and the battleground is chosen. Let’s get this thermonuclear war started.
2011 was the year that the major mobile platform providers loaded up with ammunition in the upcoming world war between Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Google. Apple acquired patents from Novell while the “Rock Star” group of RIM, Microsoft and Apple won the majority of Nortel’s patents. Google went big and bought everything that Motorola owned. We know all of this already. But, that was just the staging area. The real test will be in 2012. On Monday, the United States Department of Justice approved all of those acquisitions in one fell swoop.
Steve Jobs promised to go “thermonuclear” on Android over patent violations. That seems to be a dying wish that Apple is willing to pursue. Now that the big guns are out, what will be the consequence to the mobile ecosystem? Will the arms race force a détente, powerful patent portfolios canceling each other out? Or is this the beginning of disruptive lawsuits that ultimately becomes harmful to consumers looking for choice?
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Where the Guns are Pointed
We are going to try to make this as simple as possible. If you want the real grit on patent lawsuits, check out our coverage here or check on various patent issues.
For the first few rounds of patent battles, Microsoft and Apple fought a proxy war with Android and Google by bringing patent lawsuits against Android OEMs like Samsung, HTC and Motorola. The only company coming directly after Google over mobile patents was Oracle, based on its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and Android’s use of Java.
Apple’s cold war with Android focused on getting Android devices off the shelves in key markets. Both Samsung and HTC felt the brunt of Apple’s lawsuits. Motorola has caught Apple’s recent ire, with a new “anti-suit” filed this week in San Diego that accuses Motorola of using “FRAND” patents in lawsuits. FRAND stands for “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory.” A patent is determined to be a FRAND if it becomes an industry standard. Motorola, as one of the founding fathers of mobility, owns a boatload of “essential” patents, many of which surround various implementations of “3G.”
The blow-by-blow of patent battles is an onerous study. Trying to explain Apple’s “anti-suit” against Motorola in regards to Qualcomm based-band patents is like trying to have a conversation about quantum mechanics underwater. In this discussion, the blow-by-blow is not the point. What it boils down to is the idea of essential patents. Motorola owns many of the industry standard patents and says that it will cap its licensing fee of these patents at 2.25% of every device sold. In a market that has billions of dollars at stake, 2.25% is a pretty significant number.
The troubling thing about Motorola’s suits that have use the essential patents is that it could set a difficult precedent for the industry. The notion of FRAND is that companies do not bring essential patents to court because it is not fair or reasonable to impose fees on the entire industry on industry standard technology.
The thing about all the recent patent acquisitions is that every one of the major players in the ecosystem now own significant numbers of essential patents. Nortel and Novell patent repositories held significant numbers of essential patents, one of the reasons that the bidding was out of control.
This chart from Reuters was published in Aug. 2011 but still gives a pretty good idea of who is suing whom in the patent wars.
The question now becomes: what will be done with these patents?
The Cost to the Consumer
The primary concerns the U.S. Department of Justice expressed when approving the three acquisitions surrounded these standard essential patents (SEPs). For a breakdown of the issue, read the DOJ’s full statement issued on Monday regarding the approval process.
There are a few key takeaways:
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The division’s concerns about the potential anticompetitive use of SEPs was lessened by the clear commitments by Apple and Microsoft to license SEPs on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, as well as their commitments not to seek injunctions in disputes involving SEPs. Google’s commitments were more ambiguous and do not provide the same direct confirmation of its SEP licensing policies.
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Apple’s and Google’s substantial share of mobile platforms makes it more likely that as the owners of additional SEPs they could hold up rivals, thus harming competition and innovation. For example, Apple would likely benefit significantly through increased sales of its devices if it could exclude Android-based phones from the market or raise the costs of such phones through IP-licenses or patent litigation. Google could similarly benefit by raising the costs of, or excluding, Apple devices because of the revenues it derives from Android-based devices
The DOJ noted that Microsoft and RIM’s low market share makes it unlikely either company could bring lawsuits based on essential patents because it would ultimately prove unprofitable.
Where does this whole mess lead us? The DOJ’s concerns are that patent litigation will lead to competitors extorting higher rates from each other, hence making it less profitable to be in the mobile business and more expensive for the consumer. While Motorola or other Android OEMs would love to block the sale of Apple products in certain countries, the real goal is to extract money from the iPhone maker. Apple has plenty of money and one of the reasons it is sitting on its pile of cash is to fight these lawsuits and provide a buffer to its profitability. Apple has the ability to have Android devices taken off store shelves and has done it with HTC and Samsung in the past.
So, what does thermonuclear patent war look like? Higher prices for consumers, the squeezing of the ecosystem in such a way that weaker companies die off, stifling of innovation because of regulatory or legal concerns and the slowdown of product releases that have the potential to shape the fundamental nature of how people live there lives.
Without Android, Apple would love to issue every man, woman and child in the world an iPhone, subsidized through the carriers. It can continue its iterative and boring product release schedule. Android would love to push the iPhone and its profit gobbling monstrosity out of the industry but then people would be deprived of the one splendid device that has come to define a generation.
Patent agreements, especially surrounding standard essential patents, are a cost of doing business in our modern industry. But, when business start taking innovative products off shelves and forcing competitors into bankruptcy, a line has been crossed. The industry now stands on the edge of a knife. With everybody armed to the teeth will they find a way to co-exist or will they fire their warheads to the detriment of all?
Top image courtesy Shutterstock
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CEO: Twitter Won’t Be Ready For IPO For “A Couple Of Years”
Feb 14th
Don’t expect a initial public offering of shares of Twitter anytime soon.
CNN is reporting that the company has placed restrictions on employees who hold shares, forcing them to keep 80 percent of the shares they own. The cable news outlet cited company emails about the policy, which has been in effect for a year, and said at least one high-level employee resigned because of the policy.
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There has been widespread speculation that Twitter would follow Facebook and float an IPO, perhaps as soon as 2013. But, officially, the company has made no public comment about its plans.
The restriction, according to CNN, is primarily in place because it helps keep Twitter under 500 shareholders. While companies can remain private after they hit that threshold, they are required to publicly disclose certain financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Facebook was reportedly nearing that number, which may have factored in its decision to file an IPO earlier this month.
In August, Twitter’s senior technical engineer, Evan Weaver, sent an email to the entire company saying he was resigning over policy differences, according to CNN. Later that same day Twitter CEO Dick Costolo sent out an email explaining the policy and the main reason for it.
“We don’t want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth,” Costolo wrote in his August email. “We’re not ready to be a public company for a couple years.”
We’ve asked Twitter for comment and will update if we hear back. The company declined CNN’s request for comment.
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Facebook Deprecating 50+ Page Insights Metrics – Are You Ready?
Feb 8th
Some metrics will be completely eliminated; others are being replaced by metrics added to the Graph API. If you haven’t already stopped using the deprecated metrics, you probably have your work cut out for you to quickly get the updates in place.
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Is Twitter Ready For Some Football?
Feb 3rd
Sunday’s Super Bowl is full of betting possibilities, but one line we couldn’t find in Vegas is whether or not Twitter will crash because of heavy traffic during the game.
This year’s NFL playoffs have already set one record for the most tweeted sports moment in history, when a Tim Tebow pass stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers on the first play of overtime against the Denver Broncos. The 9,420 tweets per second were not enough to cripple Twitter, but on New Year’s Eve in Japan 16,197 per second brought the service down. There is speculation that this year’s Super Bowl will set new records for both Facebook and Twitter.
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We’ve asked Twitter if they’ve made an contingencies for Sunday’s game and will update as soon as we hear back from them. Such an incident doesn’t just affect users, but also loads of sports apps that let users track chatter about the game using Twitter’s API.
Most recent Twitter crashes have occurred as a result of a clearly-defined moment: midnight on New Year’s in a part of the world where Twitter is more popular than Facebook was a good candidate. For Twitter to crash on Sunday, we suspect there would have to be a key, game-shattering play like the Tebow pass. With even more people tuning into the game it would most certainly shatter that record, although it’s unclear whether it would be enough to bring the site down.
Super Bowl commercials aren’t likely to produce a Twitter-crashing moment, either, as most of the commercials have already been leaked online. So many surprises have already been given away already that today marked the first time since 1988 that USA Today did not publish a list of Super Bowl advertisers on the Friday before the game.
Predictions
- A close game will produce a moment that makes it into the Top 10 list of most tweeted events: most likely it’s a game-ending play or a referee’s announcement after video review of a disputed call.
- That moment makes the Top 10 but does not cause Twitter to crash.
- That moment doesn’t come close to breaking the all-time tweets-per-second record of 25,088 set in December when a popular anime film was shown on Japanese television.
- And not that it has anything to do with tech or Twitter, or anything other than geographic bias, but the Patriots win a fourth Super Bowl with a 31-21 win.
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Get Ready For a World of Connected Devices
Feb 3rd
“This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.” HAL; 2001: A Space Odyssey
Editor’s note: this is a longer version of ReadWriteWeb Editor-in-chief Richard MacManus’ article for the SAY Media newsletter. The newsletter is delivered weekly and features SAY Media’s take on media, culture, venn diagrams and the occasional Kubrick homage. You can sign up for it here.
Over half of all devices at this year’s CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show, were Internet connected. Nearly 60% of those were non-traditional computing devices such as TVs, cars, refrigerators and washing machines. Connected devices are proliferating throughout our homes and the world around us. Which means consumers are about to become a whole lot more connected to the world.
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According to the GSMA, a worldwide association of mobile operators and related companies, there are 9 billion connected devices in the world today. By 2020, there will be 24 billion and over half of them will be non-mobile devices such as household appliances. The GSMA estimates that connected devices will be a US$1.2 trillion market by 2020. So marketers and publishers better get ready for this new world too.
Reaching Consumers in Their Connected Cars
Connected devices will be a US$1.2 trillion market by 2020. So marketers and publishers better get ready for this new world too.
Consumers now expect to have a personalized media experience wherever they go. Look at how online music services have ramped up over the past year, in particular Pandora, Spotify, Rdio and MOG. With these services consumers can personalize their music listening on their computers, smartphones, tablets – and now their cars. The implication is that you’ll need to reassess how people discover and keep informed about your product or service. People will listen to the car radio less now, for example, because they can access a personalized music stream in their car via services like Spotify and Rdio.
At this year’s CES, car manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Audi were touting new media and communications features. Commonly referred to as a connected car, the prevailing trend is to integrate smartphone apps into the car’s dashboard. This enables drivers and passengers to listen to online music, access news and other content, stream video and more.
Because media is so much more personalized now, you will be able to target your message more precisely to the audience you want to reach.
The bad news for marketers is that this narrows the range of broadcast media where you can reach consumers even more. The car radio will soon be usurped by online content, whether it be for music or news. The good news is that because media is so much more personalized now, you will be able to target your message more precisely to the audience you want to reach. That’s because streaming media inside cars and throughout the home dramatically increases the amount of interest data collected about users. For example every song listened to on Spotify – no matter if it’s played on a computer or inside a car – is logged by Spotify (and increasingly Facebook) into a database with the rest of that user’s music preferences. It will all be anonymized, because privacy will become the biggest hot topic for users in this new era, but it’ll still be very valuable demographic and interest data for marketers.
To give you an indication of how pervasive the trend of connected cars is becoming, look at the evolution of Ford.
The American firm first introduced Internet technology inside its cars with Sync, launched in 2007. Sync is voice-activated technology which connects your smartphone and MP3 player to your car’s dashboard and steering wheel. There are currently 4 million Ford cars in North America that have Sync running. The latest evolution of Sync is called MyFord Touch, an in-car communications and entertainment system which makes it even easier for drivers to consume Internet content.
In short, the connected car is going mainstream. In Ford’s newest hybrid car, the 2013 Fusion, one of the main features is its connection to the Internet.
Connected cars are set to ramp up rapidly in the coming years. The GSMA predicts that the automotive sector will account for 1.4 billion (nearly 6%) of the world’s 24 billion connected devices by 2020. If you’re a marketer or publisher, that’s a platform you’ll want to be on!
Internet TVs & Personalized Media
For the consumer, it’s all about personalizing one’s media experience. The TV is another device where this trend is playing out.
Formats will evolve. We’ll see TV stars and brands creating their own YouTube channels and releasing short bursts of content to the Web.
Traditional TV networks have already been disrupted by time-shifting devices, which enable consumers to fast forward through ads. The next step is bypassing TV networks altogether, as consumers increasingly access TV content via the Web. YouTube is undergoing a transformation as we speak: from a place to watch cat videos on a PC, to a place to watch high quality professional video content on a TV set.
While popular TV network shows such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad will continue to reach a large swath of people, Internet TV opens up opportunities for new types of video content to emerge and become popular too. Formats will evolve. We’ll see TV stars and brands creating their own YouTube channels and releasing short bursts of content to the Web. But also, we’ll see web applications arise that mix TV content with Internet programming. This is fertile ground for publishers to innovate and for marketers to latch onto to reach niche audiences.
The rise of Internet TV was evidenced at this year’s CES by Samsung’s announcements.
Samsung is the world’s number 1 TV brand and it launched significant upgrades to its Smart TV product line. Samsung’s 2012 model TVs will enable users to consume a mix of traditional TV programming and Web apps. The devices are ready, now it’s time for new types of content and apps to bloom.
The next big thing in computing isn’t a new model smartphone or laptop. It’s the Internet empowering everything else around us.
Another trend to watch is the increasing interactivity of TV. A key part of Internet TVs is moving beyond the remote control and into other forms of user interface. With a new feature that Samsung calls “Smart Interaction,” viewers will be able to control their TV using gesture and voice controls, as well as face recognition. This is similar to how Microsoft’s Kinect works on XBox. It will be an increasingly common form of user interface, as 24 billion devices go online over the next 8 years. Publishers and marketers will need to adapt to these new forms of interaction.
The next big thing in computing isn’t a new model smartphone or laptop. It’s the Internet empowering everything else around us. Our cars, TVs and many other devices. Which means we all need to think about engaging digital Internet experiences for the car, TV and every device imaginable – because that’s where audiences are heading.
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Click Ready Marketing, An Atlanta SEO Company, Announces New Small Business … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Jan 14th
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Click Ready Marketing, An Atlanta SEO Company, Announces New Small Business …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) These new plans include: YouTube Slideshow Video Creation, SEO Press Releases, Paid Mommy Blog Reviews, Link Building, FaceBook Marketing, Google Places Optimization, and Google Adwords to just name a few of the offsite services included in these new … |
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South Korea Ready to Intervene as Kim’s Death Clouds Outlook – BusinessWeek
Dec 19th
 ABC News |
South Korea Ready to Intervene as Kim's Death Clouds Outlook
BusinessWeek By Eunkyung Seo and Andy Sharp Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) — South Korea said it's prepared to intervene in markets as the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il clouded the outlook for an economy already faltering on weak export demand. … S. Koreans in disbelief, but life goes on NEWS | SAN DIEGO Kim's death not 'rating trigger' for South Korea, Fitch says |
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Get Ready for IPv6
Dec 2nd
It’s an IPv4 world today, but the days of IPv4 are numbered.
As of February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) had allocated all remaining public IP address ranges to the five global regional Internet registries. A quick look at this IPv4 Exhaustion Counter below shows a total of 13.24 /8 (8-bit) IPv4 address ranges remaining, for a total of less than 3,400 remaining unallocated IPv4 addresses. Essentially, this means
IPv4 is played out.
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In this sponsored brief by Ed Tittel and Jeff Carrell, you can dive into the basics of IPv6 and start planning your network’s transition.
How to Prepare for IPv6 Networking explains the benefits of IPv6 (it’s not just more addresses), what’s needed to support IPv6 and a case study for IPv6 setup. If you’re not acquainted with IPv6 yet, it’s time to get started.
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