Posts tagged Street
Welcome to Wall Street: The Instagram Buy Is All About Facebook’s Investors
Apr 9th
When Pepsi realized it had converted as many Coca-Cola drinkers as it was going to, it started acquiring fast food chains, including Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken (which were later spun off as Yum! Brands). It made sense, on the surface: each chain’s outlets were a new place to sell Pepsi products, analysts reasoned.
But, in reality, several of the chains and their franchisees already sold Pepsi products. Those deals were more about making pizza, tacos and fried chicken products that Pepsi sold in addition to soft drinks. And so it goes with today’s announcement by Facebook that it will acquire Instagram for $1 billion. Yes, Facebook may convert some of Instagram’s users who aren’t already on Facebook into Facebook users, but more than anything, this is an effort to show that Facebook can open new revenue streams even as its user growth levels off.
Sponsor
Facebook’s acquisition – no matter what Mark Zuckerberg tells you in a press release – is less about better integrating Instagram’s services into the world’s biggest social network (which it already does quite nicely) and more about becoming a publicly traded behemoth. Publicly traded companies need to grow to keep investors happy, and if they can’t do so by adding new users or boosting new revenue streams, they do it by gobbling up rivals.
So we’re skeptical when Zuckerberg says things like, “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.” It may not be Facebook’s decision for much longer: As we have maintained since Facebook announced its IPO in February, Facebook will change dramatically after its shares go public, and if investors want more acquisitions like the Instagram buy, Facebook will make those acquisitions.
Little Change for Facebook, Instagram Users
“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family,” Zuckerberg wrote in announcing the deal. “Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.”
But, as many have already noted, Instagram already plays nicely with Facebook. The biggest takeaway from Zuckerberg’s statement is that Instagram will continue to operate and be built independently: You won’t have to join Facebook or Instagram to use the other, and at least in the short-term – and most-likely the long-term – you probably won’t notice the two companies are now linked. As Instagram founder Kevin Systrom noted, Instagram is not going away.
If there are changes, they’ll be positive ones: Instagram, which was reportedly working on securing a secondary round of financing, can now focus on improving its product. Facebook, meanwhile, can abandon attempts to build a mobile sharing app that would top Instagram. Speaking of mobile, if Facebook plays this acquisition right, it may alleviate some investor concerns about how it will grow revenue on the mobile side of its business.
Instagram will be one of Facebook’s biggest acquisitions to date, but still tiny in comparison to the more than $100 billion in capitalization Facebook is looking to raise in its initial public offering next month. What has worried potential investors leading up to the IPO is Facebook’s relatively dismal advertising growth performance, and the fact that its user growth is slowing, and will eventually level off, and that for all practical purposes, Facebook appears to be a one-trick pony.
With social networking increasingly becoming a field dominated by the big three of Twitter, Facebook and Google+, it is niche social networks like Instagram that will become the space for growth in the future. Facebook is ultimately showing it can grow in those niche spaces even if it isn’t necessarily innovating Instagram-like networks.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Twitter Won’t Hand Over Data on Occupy Wall Street Protester
Mar 23rd
Barely two weeks after the New York District Attorney asked Twitter to hand over data about an Occupy Wall Street protester, the company says it will not comply with the request, at least for the time being.
The D.A.’s office had sent a subpoena to the microblogging service’s headquarters seeking information about the account belonging to Jeffrey Rae, one of several hundred activists arrested during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York on March 1.
Sponsor
Paul Mills, the attorney representing Rae, filed a motion to quash the subpoena on March 15 on the grounds that the request was in violation of California’s requirements for out-of-state subpoenas. Twitter’s legal department then informed the D.A.’s office that they would not comply with the request until the motion was resolved, Mills tells ReadWriteWeb.
Earlier this week, the D.A. offered Rae what’s known as an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which effectively lifts the subpoena and may lead to the charges being dropped all together.
“When I received the subpoena, I was pretty shocked,” says Rae. “The District Attorney was subpoenaing my Twitter account over small charges like disorderly conduct and blocking traffic.”
Curiously, most of the data authorities sought, like a copy of Rae’s tweets from within a certain range of dates, was already publicly available. This fact lead him to believe that the motion was made “purely for intimidation and harassment.”
Other information sought in the original request included his name, address, records of session times, the length of those sessions, which devices he used to access his Twitter account and any IP addresses from which he connected.
The New York District Attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Where Social Media Meets Activism, a Legal Gray Area Emerges
This case illustrates something of a legal gray area that has emerged as social media has converged with political activism. As tools like Facebook and Twitter continue to play an increasingly prominent role in how demonstrations are organized and documented, exactly what types of information law enforcement has rightful access to remains unclear.
Before Jeffrey Rae, there was Malcom Harris. As he detailed for Reuters, Harris had his Twitter account subpoenaed for reasons related to his involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement. As in Rae’s case, Harris’s lawyer filed a motion to have that subpoena quashed.
Similar requests for data from companies like Google and Twitter have been made in the ongoing U.S. investigation of Wikileaks as well. As incidents like this pile up, they continue to raise eyebrows among digital privacy advocates and civil libertarians.
Just heard a report that 400 are marching south on Broadway from Times Sq. #OWS #OccupyWallSt
— Jeff Rae (@jeffrae) March 22, 2012
For now, the threat of Rae having his Twitter data handed over to authorities is lifted. Despite the headaches caused by the affair, he says his level of commitment to the Occupy cause hasn’t changed. Last weekend, his Twitter stream buzzed with updates from the ground in Union Square in New York, where Occupy demonstrators began reconvening after a relatively quiet Winter.
“It’s nice knowing the subpoena is gone, if only because it’s one less thing to deal with,” says Rae. “I’ve been pretty active with Occupy from the beginning and something like this is not going to stop me from being involved.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Twitter: We Won’t Hand Over Data on Occupy Wall Street Protester
Mar 23rd
Barely two weeks after the New York District Attorney asked Twitter to hand over data about an Occupy Wall Street protester, the company says it will not comply with the request.
The D.A.’s office had sent a subpoena to the microblogging service’s headquarters seeking information about the account belonging to Jeffrey Rae, one of several hundred activists arrested during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York on March 1.
Sponsor
Paul Mills, the attorney representing Rae, filed a motion to quash the subpoena on March 15 on the grounds that the request was in violation of California’s requirements for out-of-state subpoenas. Twitter’s legal department then informed the D.A.’s office that they would not comply with the request until the motion was resolved, Mills tells ReadWriteWeb.
Earlier this week, the D.A. offered Rae what’s known as an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which effectively lifts the subpoena and may lead to the charges being dropped all together.
“When I received the subpoena, I was pretty shocked,” says Rae. “The District Attorney was subpoenaing my Twitter account over small charges like disorderly conduct and blocking traffic.”
Curiously, most of the data authorities sought, like a copy of Rae’s tweets from within a certain range of dates, was already publicly available. This fact lead him to believe that the motion was made “purely for intimidation and harassment.”
Other information sought in the original request included his name, address, records of session times, the length of those sessions, which devices he used to access his Twitter account and any IP addresses from which he connected.
The New York District Attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Where Social Media Meets Activism, a Legal Gray Area Emerges
This case illustrates something of a legal gray area that has emerged as social media has converged with political activism. As tools like Facebook and Twitter continue to play an increasingly prominent role in how demonstrations are organized and documented, exactly what types of information law enforcement has rightful access to remains unclear.
Before Jeffrey Rae, there was Malcom Harris. As he detailed for Reuters, Harris had his Twitter account subpoenaed for reasons related to his involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement. As in Rae’s case, Harris’s lawyer filed a motion to have that subpoena quashed.
Similar requests for data from companies like Google and Twitter have been made in the ongoing U.S. investigation of Wikileaks as well. As incidents like this pile up, they continue to raise eyebrows among digital privacy advocates and civil libertarians.
Just heard a report that 400 are marching south on Broadway from Times Sq. #OWS #OccupyWallSt
— Jeff Rae (@jeffrae) March 22, 2012
For now, the threat of Rae having his Twitter data handed over to authorities is lifted. Despite the headaches caused by the affair, he says his level of commitment to the Occupy cause hasn’t changed. Last weekend, his Twitter stream buzzed with updates from the ground in Union Square in New York, where Occupy demonstrators began reconvening after a relatively quiet Winter.
“It’s nice knowing the subpoena is gone, if only because it’s one less thing to deal with,” says Rae. “I’ve been pretty active with Occupy from the beginning and something like this is not going to stop me from being involved.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
New York City Subpoenas Twitter For Occupy Wall Street Protester Data
Mar 12th
U.S. activists who thought Twitter was a secure way to communicate during demonstrations may have another thing coming. The New York District Attorney’s Office has begun sending subpoenas to Twitter seeking data on protesters arrested during the Occupy Wall Street protests last year.
Late last week, activist Jeffrey Rae received one such email, which included a copy of a subpoena from the D.A. requesting data from his Twitter account. The letter, which has been published on Scribd, demands that Twitter hand over a list of data, including all public tweets from Rae’s account between September 15 and October 31, 2011.
Sponsor
Other information sought by the D.A.’s office includes his name, address, records of session times, the length of those sessions, the types of devices used by Rae to access Twitter and any IP addresses from which he connected.
Rae was one of several hundred people who were arrested on October 1 for attempting to march across the Brooklyn Bridge as part of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests. Like others, he was charged with blocking traffic, improper use of a roadway and failure to obey orders.
Rae said he plans on challenging the subpoena in court. The District Attorney’s Office did not respond to inquiries from ReadWriteWeb via telephone or email seeking comment.
This is not the first time Twitter has been asked to hand over data on Occupy Wall Street protestors. In February, activist Malcom Harris got a similar notice from Twitter’e legal department via email. Like Rae, Harris had his lawyer file a motion to challenge the subpoena.
“The biggest danger that comes from this subpoena isn’t that it’ll help convict me — I don’t think a judge will have any trouble understanding what happened on the bridge — but that it will produce a chilling effect and discourage people from using Twitter while protesting” Harris wrote for Reuters. “It’s a win-win for prosecutors: Either they use Twitter archives to build cases against demonstrators, or they scare us away from using the platform.”
Storifying Wall Street: Social Media Fuels Unrest
The Occupy Wall Street protests and their offshoots across the country have largely died down since their peak in the late fall, although the movement is still active. Like other unrest throughout the world in the last few years, the anti-Wall Street demonstrations were both documented and partially fueled by social media tools. Just as in other parts of the world, Twitter in particular played an instrumental role in helping activists stay in touch and document what happened on the ground.
Authorities realize this and are hoping to pry some more information out of companies like Twitter. Since the subpoenas in these cases are not legally sealed, Twitter is free to notify its users of the requests, which it has a policy of doing.
Last year, similar requests were made by federal authorities as part of their ongoing case against Wikileaks. Privacy advocates were troubled when Google willingly handed over private Gmail data belonging to Jacob Appelbaum, a Tor developer and known Wikileaks supporter.
About a month later, a U.S. Federal Court ordered Twitter to grant the Justice Department access to private data about three Wikileaks supporters. As in Rae’s case, the requested data included IP addresses and session times. A law called the Stored Communications Act allows authorities to seek data like this without a search warrant, a fact that does not sit well with civil libertarians and digital privacy advocates.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Can Data Tell the Story of a Location? Discovering Haight Street
Mar 5th
With the right data, you can get a pretty interesting picture of an area. Whether it’s a state, city, or even a street, you can learn a lot from data. Do you need to pack a coat if you’re visiting in March? What’s the elevation, cost of living, how many people live there? But to answer what is it like? That takes a bit more doing.
This was the topic of Jesper Andersen’s talk at Strata, “Building a Data Narrative: Discovering Haight Street.” The idea, to “see how far we can go” in understanding San Francisco’s famous Haight Street through as much data as possible.
Sponsor
Tell Me a Story
Before diving into the data, Andersen made the case for providing a narrative for Haight Street. Pure numbers work for some types of data, but they’re not good at expressing social networks or explaining what a street is “like.” For example, Andersen talked about Klout and the way it tries to express a person’s social influence with a number. Klout, says Andersen, “is reductive and destroys value” in trying to sum up a person’s social network with a single number.
Andersen didn’t spare himself, either. He talked about some of his former work with Visible Path creating a “horrible interface I’m now ashamed of.” The problem, says Andersen, was trying to reduce users to scores. “Don’t give users scores, give them stories.”
So how do you create a story from the data available for Haight Street? Andersen noted that you can find a lot of data about Haight Street, but when you search WolframAlpha about Haight Street you don’t really get to know the street.
What you get is cold facts. A map that shows Haight Street as perfectly straight, but doesn’t give the elevation. It certainly doesn’t give the atmosphere of the street. To dive in to find out what the street is like, Andersen delved a bit deeper.
For example, he looked into Foursquare checkins, and mapped them along the length of Haight Street and compared them to a map of the elevation of Haight Street. He took Google Street View and tried to extract the colors of Haight Street to see what colors of Haight Street.
Andersen tried to answer questions like “where is it safe?” using DataSF.org and looking at the crime statistics. Again, he mapped these according to the length of the street and compared upper and lower Haight Street. (Lower Haight Street is less safe, statistically.)
What Are the People Like?
The hardest of questions? “What are people like on Haight Street?” To try to puzzle this out, he looked at Twitter data by location and language. Surprisingly, you’ll find a lot of Swedish folks on the upper half of Haight Street. Not surprisingly for San Francisco, many people on Haight speak Spanish or Japanese.
Andersen also tried sentiment analysis of Tweets and found that, by distribution, people were more negative on the lower half of Haight. He was also able to get some idea of what people found interesting on Haight by mapping pictures from Instagram to the street as well.
All of this information is out there, and can be used to start telling a story about a location past hard facts. It’s not a perfect picture, but it’s a start towards storytelling with data instead of just a jumble of numbers and facts that don’t paint much of a picture at all. Andersen’s attempt suggests that there are ways to use existing data for storytelling. What’s more, there could be a big opportunity for app makers to look for new ways to collect and display data to paint better pictures of real life.
Haight Street photo courtesy of Wikipedia under the (CC BY-SA 3.0).
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Street View has Patent, Urination Problems
Mar 5th
Google Street View has often been the subject of controversy. The latest: Google and Apple are facing a patent lawsuit for Street View technology used on the iPhone and iPad, while an urination image is causing legal troubles for Google in France.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Think Wall Street Executives Make Too Much Money? Check Out Facebook
Feb 17th
Where did Facebook’s profits go last year?
Fortune is pointing out that, according to the company’s initial public offering, 8% went to its top five executives. That’s more than most Wall Street firms, including JP Morgan Chase, which only shelled out $79 million to its top five executives.
Sponsor
That is even more remarkable when you consider that the investment bank has 239,831 employees, compared to Facebook’s 3,200.
Facebook isn’t commenting as it waits out a quiet period ahead of its shares hitting the market. But the scrutiny is something the company should get used to: excessive executive compensation is a surefire way to tick off shareholders and would-be shareholders.
As Fortune senior editor Stephen Gandel points out:
“You can make the case that start-ups have to pay out a higher ratio of their bottom line in pay than a big bank would because they don’t make a lot of money. But Facebook isn’t your typical start-up. It’s bottom line is already $1 billion. What’s more, in the year before Google (GOOG) went public back in 2004, the search firm top executives collectively received just $2.2 million in pay. Of course, those guys were set to get a huge payday from IPO, but so is Zuckerberg and Co.”
The chart above was compile by Fortune shows Facebook’s executive compensation as a percentage of profits when compared with similarly-sized companies.
Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Czech Republic Gives Google Green Light To Resume Street View
Feb 3rd
After more than two years, and a few important concessions from Google, the Czech Republic is letting the company resume its Street View service. As Czech Position reports, Google has agreed to several conditions put forth by the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection: Google will take photos…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Did International Markets Cause Google’s Loss Of Love On Wall Street?
Jan 24th
Wall Street wasn’t terribly impressed with Google’s figures for the last quarter of 2011 announced after the bell last thursday. To a normal person, you would think that generating $2.71 billion profit and significantly beating your own previous quarters would be a cause for…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
As Australian Main Street Retail Figures Fall Online Stores Continue to Grow – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Jan 22nd
|
As Australian Main Street Retail Figures Fall Online Stores Continue to Grow
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Australian SEO Company Oracle Digital announces that savvy businesses are reaping the rewards in the online space. Australian SEO Company Oracle Digital are no strangers to the online world, and have now explained how savvy businesses have been … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
