In Silicon Valley, every startup fears than an established brand will one day acquire a rival or build a similar offering and instantly become the industry gorilla. When it comes to advertising, Google, which claims not only both the largest ad network and number of relationships with advertisers, but the most automated and profitable system on the Internet, is the most obvious example of this phenomenon. Ditto for Oracle and Cisco in the enterprise software space and eBay and Amazon in e-commerce.

Yet while fear of the 800-pound gorilla rightfully looms, upstart ad ventures can take heart in mounting evidence that suggests online ad categories are not cornered by deep-pocketed brands, but by new market entrants. This has held true across several different categories, including Google in search, DoubleClick in ad serving, Advertising.com in display, NexTag in CPA, RightMedia in exchanges and AdMob in mobile. Each of these companies emerged from humble beginnings to become billion-dollar businesses, and did so in the face of large, incumbent competitors. Additionally, a slew of other firms exited at valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars, among them Overture (search), Atlas (ad serving), ValueClick (display) and Quattro (mobile), to name just a few.

So, what makes online ad categories so likely to be won by new entrants? History sheds some light:

First, on an economic front, online ad businesses exhibit clear network effects that ultimately preclude incumbents from contending in the category. When Advertising.com began to scale its network in the early 2000s, two trends emerged. As the company generated more leads for advertisers, the advertisers were willing to pay more per lead, and as it bought more inventory from publishers, they become more willing to accept lower per-impression CPMs. Per-impression ad-serving costs for DoubleClick and per-impression publisher onboarding costs for AdMob demonstrate similar network benefits. Each of these examples make clear that in online ad categories, new entrants grow so quickly that they effectively create a market dynamic in which slower-moving and less nimble incumbents simply can’t compete.

Second, on an innovation front, the classic innovator’s dilemma is unusually powerful in new ad categories because incumbents are hampered by legacy business models and technology infrastructure developed during a prior market development phase. When NexTag entered the education and finance lead-generation business, it brought with it a new model for buying traffic and valuing it on a per-impression basis based on advanced algorithms. Within a few years, NexTag’s internal media buying tools were so automated and accurate compared to the company’s predecessors that it was able to far out-pay for good inventory — and avoid paying for bad inventory at all. NexTag’s suite of media technologies put it at an advantage as the category grew and the cost of inventory rose, further enabling it to pull away from the pack and eventually exit for more than $1 billion. Incumbents often underestimate the importance of iterating early in a market, which means that as a category matures and the price of learning goes up, they find themselves falling behind.

Third, relationships with key inventory sources matter. On the Internet, there are millions of inventory sources, but only a few that can change the dynamics of the category. In search, it was the relationship that Google developed to monetize Yahoo search results. In display, it was Advertising.com’s entrenched relationship with the AIM client that enabled it to generate millions of dollars in profit from view-through conversions. And in exchanges it was the Yahoo partnership that solidified RightMedia as the No. 1 ad exchange. Incumbents seem more willing to give huge inventory opportunities to small, up-and-coming companies than they are to building out solutions internally. Such tight-knit relationships ensure the success of new entrants across the board.

The final lesson history has taught us is that focus leads to superior execution. Perhaps the least recognized but most valuable asset new entrants have is focus. In their respective times, Google was the best search engine, RightMedia was the best ad exchange and AdMob was the best mobile ad platform. Yes, incumbents often build a better product down the line (DoubleClick’s Ad Exchange is one example), but by that point the new entrant has already exited, as RightMedia did for $680 million. Incumbents know this fact implicitly, so it’s imperative that startups invest in and preserve their focus as they continue to grow.

The next generation of online ad categories is already repeating history. The key for investors and entrepreneurs is to identify which areas are going to be categories, not features, and get involved with them early.

Tod M. Sacerdoti is the CEO and co-founder of BrightRoll; follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/todsacerdoti. Disclosure: Brightroll is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

   

The Out-of-Print Archive alerted me that they've got an issue of '90s UK magazine Mega Drive Advanced Gaming available for download. That, in 'n of itself, isn't really news. I have an external hard drive full of PDFs of old game and computer mags, after all -- nearly all of which, I suppose, are a bit questionable in terms of legal status. The real news here is that the Out-of-Print Archive has received full permission from the publisher, Hugh Gollner, to distribute the mag online.

Gollner was the head of Gollner Publishing, which began with an Atari ST fanzine and eventually expanded to game titles ST Action and Amiga Action, both of which served their computers pretty amicably. Future's Amiga Power is the mag that UK computer gamers remember the most fondly these days, but Amiga Action actually outlasted it on the stands, continuing until December of 1996 -- a fair bit after there was no real action on the Amiga to speak of.

As Gollner recalls in the interview he did for the site, Amiga Action wasn't necessarily better written than the competition, but it did have Amiga Power beat in one important field:

"We just worked out that if you stuck more and more coverdisks on, then sales went up. I think we had at least three disks on at one point! ... I really respected Future Publishing and especially Chris Anderson, Greg Ingham and Steve Jarratt. Future revolutionized computing magazines -- they made them 'sexy' as Chris used to say. In the early days I got an offer from Chris to come and work for him -- I wished I'd taken him up on it, but at the time we had debts running Gollner Publishing and his offer was not very generous."

Gollner eventually sold his outfit to UK publishing giant Europress, where he worked on Games-X, a weekly game mag that launched in the spring of 1991 and lasted just over a year before folding under tremendous losses. After Games-X fizzled out, Gollner left Europress and founded another publisher, Maverick Magazines, which did Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, SNES mag Super Control, and the Edge-like PC Player -- one of the first masthead appearances from current GamePro EIC John Davison.

Until now, I didn't really know the name "Maverick" except from the rather poor job the publisher did on The One in its waning months. But Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, despite the stilted name, is a pretty decent piece of work -- at least as good as Future's MEGA in terms of content, although there were so many 16-bit console mags in the UK that it was often tough for any individual title to stand out of the crowd. It's certainly worth a download and peer-through for 16-bit fans, in my opinion.

Gollner has given the Out-of-Print Archive permission to release all of the mags his publishing outfits released, which is extremely generous of him -- I definitely look forward to seeing more of his publishing work. It'd be nice if more publishers gave out permission like this, but considering there's pretty much no money to be made off doing so, I doubt that the Futures and EMAPs of the world are going to agree anytime soon. Ah, well, back to my grey-area external drive...

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Charles Arthur investigates how the ways in which we watch sport, read magazines and do business with each other could change for ever

Don't act too surprised if, some time in the next year, you meet someone who explains that their business card isn't just a card; it's an augmented reality business card. You can see a collection and, at visualcard.me, you can even design your own, by adding a special marker to your card, which, once put in front of a webcam linked to the internet, will show not only your contact details but also a video or sound clip. Or pretty much anything you want.

It's not just business cards. London Fashion Week has tried them out too: little symbols that look like barcodes printed onto shirts, which, when viewed through a webcam, come to life. Benetton is using augmented reality for a campaign that kicked off last month, in which it is trying to find models from among the general population.

Augmented reality – AR, as it has quickly become known – has only recently become a phrase that trips easily off technologists' lips; yet we've been seeing versions of it for quite some time. The idea is straightforward enough: take a real-life scene, or (better) a video of a scene, and add some sort of explanatory data to it so that you can better understand what's going on, or who the people in the scene are, or how to get to where you want to go.

Sports coverage on TV has been doing it for years: slow-motion could be described as a form of augmented reality, since it gives you the chance to examine what happened in a situation more carefully. More recently cricket, tennis, rugby, football and golf have all started to overlay analytic information on top of standard-speed replays – would that ball have hit the stumps, the progress of a rally, the movement of the backs or wingers, the relative flights of shots – to tell you more about what's going on. Probably the most common use is in American football where the "first down" line – the distance the team has to cover to continue its offence – is superimposed on the picture for viewers.

But those required huge systems. AR took its first lumbering steps into the public arena eight years ago: all that you needed to do was strap on 10kg of computing power – laptop, camera, vision processor – and you could get an idea of what was feasible. The American Popular Science magazine wrote about the idea in 2002 – but the idea of being permanently connected to the internet hadn't quite jelled at that point.

"AR has been around for ages," says Andy Cameron, executive director of Fabrica, an interactive design studio which works with Benetton, "maybe going back as far as the 1970s and art installations that overlaid real spaces with something virtual." He mentions in particular the work of pioneering computer artist Myron Krueger.

What's changed in the past year is that AR has come within reach of all sorts of developers – and the technology powerful enough to make use of it is owned by millions of people, often in the palms of their hands.

The arrival of powerful smartphones and computers with built-in video capabilities means that you don't have to wait for the AR effects as you do with TV. They can simply be overlaid onto real life. Step forward Apple's iPhone, and phones using Google's Android operating system, both of which are capable of overlaying information on top of a picture or video.

Within the small world of AR, one of the best-known apps is that built by Layar, which – given a location, and using the iPhone 3GS's inbuilt compass to work out the direction you're pointing the phone – can give you a "radar map" of details such as Wikipedia information, Flickr photos, Google searches and YouTube videos superimposed onto a picture you've taken of the scene. For Americans, it will also pull in details from the government's economic Recovery Act – so that if you're on Wall Street and want to see how many billions went into which building, it will show you.

Or, more usefully, Yelp offers an augmented reality application that will show you ratings and reviews for a restaurant before you walk in – the sort of thing that could make restaurants quiver with delight, or shudder in horror.

Or maybe it wouldn't need to know where it is; only who it's looking at. A prototype application demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February took things a little further again. Point the phone at a person and if it can find their details, it will pull them off the web and attach details – their Twitter username, Facebook page and other facts – and stick them, rather weirdly, into the air around their head (viewed through your phone, of course). "It's taking social networking to the next level," says Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish mobile software company.

And there are fabulously useful applications: at Columbia University, computer science professor Steve Feiner and PhD candidate Steve Henderson have created their Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair (Armar) project. It combines sensors, head-up displays, and instructions to tackle the military's maintenance needs: start working on a piece of kit, and the details about it pop up in front of you. Imagine if you could put on a pair of special goggles when you needed to investigate your car's engine, or a computer's innards, and the detail would pop up. That's the sort of idea that Armar is trying to implement, though for the military at first..

Yet it's fashion which seems to have leapt quickest into this technology. The T-shirt with AR in London Fashion Week was developed by Cassette Playa, a label that has been worn by Lily Allen, Rihanna and Kanye West. Carri Munden, who designed it with the Fashion Digital Studio at the London College of Fashion, described it as "mixing reality and fantasy". Adidas, too, has launched trainers with AR symbols in the tongues: hold them to a webcam and you are taken to interactive games on the Adidas site.

The process by which the strange symbols get translated into images is simple enough: the website takes the feed from your webcam (you have to explicitly allow it to do so, so there are no security worries) and analyses it for the particular set of symbols that the program is looking for. (Some easy calculations mean the symbols can be detected whichever way up you hold the item.) Videos and pictures are then sent back to you.

Andy Cameron says that the arrival of an open-source, hence free, AR tool kit has let companies build their own AR applications, using Flash – the pervasive animation and video technology used for many online ads and YouTube's videos – "which immediately meant you had huge penetration, because Flash is everywhere". (Something like 98% of all computers are reckoned to have Adobe's Flash Player installed.)

"If you build your AR application with Flash, then you can get it out to everybody in the world with a computer with a webcam," says Cameron.

Benetton is using AR in its latest campaign, called "It's My Time" which aims to get members of the public to put themselves forward as potential models, and uses AR to show more details about existing models. But its first most visible use of AR was last year in issue 76 of Benetton's Colors magazine, a quarterly fashion product. Dozens of pages have AR symbols: hold the page up to a webcam, and you see film and more photos of the person on the page. "The Colors editor and the creative director of Fabrica got very excited about it," says Cameron.

Cameron can see huge potential which could even revive the fortunes of print advertising. "Think of a commercial page, an advert, in a fashion magazine. It's pretty expensive. With this – and this is the way that the more hard-nosed people in Benetton saw the advantage – it means that you can get more products on the page." Print an AR code, get people to come to the site, and you can show them so much more, while measuring the return from your effort.

The technical cost is a tiny part of the overall effort. "The printing and photography cost [of the advert] is the same. And the development cost is pretty small."

And of course where advertisers go, the publications that house them are sure to go as well. Esquire magazine in the US and Wallpaper* in Europe have done "augmented reality" editions, with Robert Downey Jr coming to life on the cover of the former, and AR text providing videos and animation in the latter. But there are more possibilities for journalism using AR: for example if you "geotag" newspaper articles (so that you say that an item relates to a particular place) then someone visiting a site could learn about events relevant to the area via their smartphone.

Book publishers too are leaping in: Carlton Publishing will release an AR book in May, featuring dinosaurs that pop out of the pages when viewed, yes, through a webcam. Future releases include war, sport and arts titles which will also have extra AR elements.

Yet in media it's the advertisers who are most excited. The possibilities of geotagged, targeted adverts – which in effect hang in the air until someone comes along to find them with a smartphone – or of AR adverts which open up a whole new world of opportunities (and perhaps discounts or loyalty bonuses) when you follow them through – are yet another glimpse of the holy grail ofads that know exactly who and where you are.

Is there a risk that we'll all become AR'd out – that it will become boring as advert after advert invites us to hold it up to a webcam? "What's hot today is ancient history tomorrow," says Cameron. "There have been a lot of bad uses of this technology with a rush to use it. We have had the chance to reflect on what it means and how to use it. The key is that it should be an enhancement of the stuff on the printed page."

Even so we're still in the early stages, he argues. "It's very primitive – having to use a webcam, holding a magazine up to it. Obviously we're really interested in the opportunities with handheld devices. It's very frustrating that the iPhone doesn't allow access to the live video stream." (Nor does it run Flash, another problem for would-be AR designers.) "People in design are very annoyed with Steve Jobs," he observes. "We don't really understand why Apple won't allow that."

Given that access, he says, "you could hold your iPhone up to a billboard and get something amazing right there". What about the alternative, such as Google's Android-based Nexus phone? "It looks like you could do it on that," he says. But of course the iPhone is a target market. "Maybe Apple wants to keep that for itself," Cameron says. "Maybe they're lodging patents. Or maybe the processor on the iPhone isn't fast enough."

Yet there are some who think that AR has already had its brief time in the sun. At the Like Minds conference in Exeter at the beginning of March, Joanne Jacobs, a social media consultant, described an AR application that demanded you buy a T-shirt and then go and sit in front of your webcam – so you could play Rock, Paper, Scissors. By yourself.

"It's hopeless," Jacobs said.

Cameron admits to some uncertainty about AR's measurable impact. "I don't know if it sells more things, but it seems clearly a good thing if we can get people who may be customers to participate in the adverts." But, he adds: "If people start to play with the adverts in a way that exposes them to more products, that's got to help bring a commercial return."

• Augmented reality
• iPhone
• Social networking
• Advertising

Charles Arthurguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Our top story this week was about bad news for the big guys: Google, Facebook, Digg's top users. As you catch up on the news, be sure to watch the conversation about China, tech and democracy that took place between activist/artist Ai Weiwei, Twitter's Jack Dorsey and ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things.

Note: We've refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.

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Story of the Week: Nexus One's woes, spies love Facebook, top Diggers lose power

• Oops: Google Denied Trademark on Android Nexus One
• Big Changes Are Coming to Digg: More Power to Publishers, Less Power to Top Diggers
• How US Government Spies Use Facebook (Updated)
• Cartoon: Can't Go to SXSW? We Feel Your Pain
• Nexus One Flopped, but Android Didn't

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Announcing the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit

Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services, augmented reality, native app vs. browser-based, commerce and marketing, mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com,

Register now for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit and get early bird rates - only $295.

Mobile Web

• Microsoft Updates Bing iPhone App and Removes It from All International iTunes Stores
• Blockbuster Brings New Releases to Android, Windows Mobile Phones
• Mobile App Marketplace: $17.5 Billion by 2012

More Mobile Web coverage

Internet of Things

• 
• Internet of Things Explained (Video)
• 6 Ways to Better Living: Inside an Internet of Things Home
• 8 Ways to Better Understand the Internet of Things

More Internet of Things coverage

Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App

We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

Real-Time Web

• 
• OneRiot Brings Its Real-Time Ads to the Web
• Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source

More Real-Time Web coverage. Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• The Death of the Pageview
• Micropayments and Subscriptions: How Business Models for Startups are Shifting
• 6 ReadWriteStart Lists: Our Best Startup Advice

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

• Provider Fail: Vodafone Sells HTC Smartphone Loaded With Malware
• Google Apps Offers Migration for Microsoft Exchange

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• IBM Makes A Major Move Into The Cloud; Amazon Is In Its Sights
• Rulers of the Cloud: Will Amazon's Computing Fabric Become a New Economy?
• The Oracle Effect: Sun's Best and Brightest Move On to New Places

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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Filed under: Features

Mark Methenitis contributes Law of the Game on Joystiq ("LGJ"), a column on legal issues as they relate to video games:

[Photo by exothermic] GDC 2010 has come and gone, but many of the discussions I had with various developers, publishers, attorneys and other great attendees have actually left me with some curious issues to explore with you here on LGJ. The first such issue is one that actually relates to the long-known (but always fuzzy) area of the law that deals with multi-level marketing systems, the more legitimate cousin of what are commonly known as "pyramid schemes." These are the slightly more legitimate looking cousin of the Ponzi scheme (most recently in the news because of Madoff), but nonetheless create a "business model" doomed to fail. Accordingly, there are statutes in nearly all 50 states and in many countries barring these types of arrangements.

But why is this relevant to gaming at all? The advent of the referral model picked up by many social and online games is the potential problem area, and while the model itself may not suffer the same faults as a traditional pyramid scheme, it could nonetheless violate the laws in that area. After all, those laws don't contemplate digital goods, which can suffer no scarcity and basically no cost to product.

Continue reading LGJ: Dawn at the Great Pyramid (Scheme)

LGJ: Dawn at the Great Pyramid (Scheme) originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Features

Mark Methenitis contributes Law of the Game on Joystiq ("LGJ"), a column on legal issues as they relate to video games:

[Photo by exothermic] GDC 2010 has come and gone, but many of the discussions I had with various developers, publishers, attorneys and other great attendees have actually left me with some curious issues to explore with you here on LGJ. The first such issue is one that actually relates to the long-known (but always fuzzy) area of the law that deals with multi-level marketing systems, the more legitimate cousin of what are commonly known as "pyramid schemes." These are the slightly more legitimate looking cousin of the Ponzi scheme (most recently in the news because of Madoff), but nonetheless create a "business model" doomed to fail. Accordingly, there are statutes in nearly all 50 states and in many countries barring these types of arrangements.

But why is this relevant to gaming at all? The advent of the referral model picked up by many social and online games is the potential problem area, and while the model itself may not suffer the same faults as a traditional pyramid scheme, it could nonetheless violate the laws in that area. After all, those laws don't contemplate digital goods, which can suffer no scarcity and basically no cost to product.

Continue reading LGJ: Dawn at the Great Pyramid (Scheme)

LGJ: Dawn at the Great Pyramid (Scheme) originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Games, software, books and other digital content publishers are welcome to utilize the new security system on unlimited number of titles and discs, and even get full technical support and customer service. (PRWeb Mar 20, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/dvd/security/prweb3756254.htm

In the last few years, there's been a push by some companies to bring back the immensely troubling "hot news doctrine," that appears to violate everything we know about the First Amendment and copyright law. Basically, the "hot news doctrine" says that if someone reports on a story, others are not allowed to report on their reporting for some period of time -- on the theory that it somehow undermines the incentive to do that original reporting. Last year, we wrote about the very troubling implications of allowing the hot news concept to stand. Beyond the free speech implications, it also has the troubling quality of effectively creating a copyright on facts -- which are quite clearly not covered by copyright. On top of that, it's not necessary in the slightest. As anyone who is actually in the online news business knows, getting a scoop gets you traffic -- even if others report the same thing minutes later. Being first gets you the attention. You don't need to artificially block others from reporting the news.

Unfortunately, with various publications struggling, some have picked up on the hot news doctrine as a way to somehow block competition. Tragically, it looks like a court has now adopted the hot news doctrine in one case. Paul Alan Levy alerts us to the news that a judge issuing an injunction against TheFlyOnTheWall.com, a website that would publish summaries of Wall Street research. The Wall Street firms said this undermined their business model -- and the court agreed. It passed an injunction saying that TheFlyOnTheWall had to hold off publishing any news about any Wall Street research report until either 10am (if the report is released early in the morning) or for two hours after it's released if it comes out during the day.

These totally arbitrary restrictions are highly troubling from a free speech standpoint and seem effectively random. This seems like yet another case of a company being upset by interference with its business model, which should be a reason to change the business model -- not run to the courts.

But what's most troubling of all is that now all the publishers who have been salivating over the hot news doctrine have a legal ruling to point to. Can you imagine how the world would work if you couldn't blog about or mention a particular piece of news for a few hours because the Associated Press got to it first? It's hard to see how this could possibly stand up to a First Amendment analysis, and it's quite troubling that the judge found the way she did.

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The shortest way to describe this is that Google is no longer a verb. It's becoming a noun. Not just the few clicks to find information, but the information itself and the experience surrounding it.

Today, we get to add Google's chapter to "Will One Company Dominate the Cloud" introspective series and take a glimpse of the silent revolution from "index" to "be" that is transforming the company and it's products to the default way to engage the Internet.

As fate has it, Google done us a big favor in preparing for this piece. The company has launched an assault on the enterprise with its movement in the Google App Engine, having a stand-off with China, and negotiating with the EU. And that was just a bit of Google news from this week.

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Whereas it's a bit more clear where Amazon and Cisco win (our recent analysis) as they head towards the cloud, with Google it takes a bit more expansive view. We have to take the focus out a bit, to be able to dial in on the details.

Acknowledgment: Developers are the Products they Build

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Tim Bray. He has been a key contributor and thought leader in key areas of interoperability and information design, including his leadership in bringing XML to the world. He recently announced that he's joining Google and focusing on Android in a transition from Sun.

Several things struck us about our dialog that we think are key for Google.

First, when Bray described his new job at Google, he talked about what he wanted to do and what he saw that needed to be done. Within three days of being there, he has a sense of ownership of the companies products and mission. In some organizations, you may never get such a luxury.

Second, Bray described his opportunity to "roll up his sleeves" and get back in the groove as a developer on a project he feels passion for. He mentioned his desire to take the open APIs of Android and expose some of the information in a more portable way, for example to transfer a call log from one phone to another. A very interesting project, with tangible results. This type of innovation lives on top of all the work the company has done to make the API exist, and to attract individuals who are willing to rethink how it should really work.

We think that this is the most interesting thing about where Google is right now. It's "open" mantra gives the company the ability to see a whole generation into the future of information channel disruption. And, by bringing in "no holds barred" developers like Bray and a legion of others, the company is patiently solving problems that many of us don't even know exist.

Lastly, Bray said something that caused us some deep thought.

His comment, "when the Drizzle team was moved into Google, they just kept working on the their open source project and things stayed nearly the same."

What caused us to pause was that open source development, whether Linux or XML, gives the developer, as a person, a way to contribute to the world. And it's documented. If the Internet was the Bible, leading a key open source initiative, is like getting your own chapter in the book, where time will be the judge of your actions. Much better than your manager alone.

To know that hard work, intellectual capital, libraries are available to the world after the contract is complete. This really speaks to the artist in us, in a way, the paid open source developer is using Google as a canvas.

If working at Google offers this emotional spark to employees, it will gain entirely new efficiencies in solving the big problems, in the context of individual efforts. Maybe this open source spirit is embedded into Twitter, and is why it works. We like to contribute to our version of the greater good...and want fans to cheer us on.

What we learned; acknowledgment matters, and connections to the whole population of people is an amazing vehicle. Google: become an indie rock star - with the strength of grep.

All of the Information on Earth

Google's destiny to become the hub of the worlds information is intertwined with history. And this comes with artifacts of policy and posturing. To start with, not everyone agrees that Google should achieve a dominant cloud position. As we're noticing, stopping it is another matter.

We'd like to suggest that in 2010, the company is not shy about stepping towards its future and will use its power, technology, and cash to stir it up. Here is our list of organizations in the world that Google has, is, or will be, continually bumping into in its quest for cloud information dominance.

• China (counties own the filters for the people)
• ATT (service providers own consumer on the network)
• Penguin (book publishers own the words in the texts)
• Visa (financial institutions own the digits in the transactions)
• Facebook (social networks know the details)
• Amazon (commerce sites own the decision point)
• Twitter (owns "what's happening")
• Microsoft (owns the computer applications and files)

Open can be a Key to Unlock Doors

We see both practical and strategic reasons that Google has a deep connection with the open source movement. Strategically, being the new optimized layer, removing all historic barriers to information give the company more leverage. Practically, solutions can be built where information is free.

Reviewing a few examples, such as Google Earth, Android, and even GMail and we see that where there are open protocols and information disruptive products can be built. Once they are built, the Google wields a significant economic advantage in binding the worlds information assets and converting them to eyeballs.

Here, we take a quick look at the information assets that Google is investing the global cloud.

• Results: Google has moved away from Page Rank to "Closest Object" in it's default results. What this means is that many businesses today show up as widget in the results in google with embedded links, maps, and other efficiencies.
• Ads: This is perhaps the best known and most valuable insight and unique asset, who wants to pay for what customer
• Realtime index: Google has worked to keep up with Twitter's realtime firehose
• Semantic index: The company continues to add more and more microsyntax parsers into its index, giving more controlled tools for publishers
• GMail: It had to be done. And it is monetized.
• Documents and files: Google Docs and the Apps Marketplace create a whole new stream of information about an individual. Private, personal, and shared.
• Mobile transactions: This is an interesting sample of where Google's strategy to build the Android OS pays off in the cloud. Not only does Google get to connect mobile to the rest of the offerings, but also to be able to dial in on movements, calls, and other critical tasks in our real-time lives.
• Books: Indexing all of them, first is an interesting piece of the strategy to break apart historic containers of knowledge. Is the book copyrighted? How about the quote?
• Browsers: The browser knows a lot. Google's Chrome moves it from being default search, to being default experience. This was a great example of where access to information "Faster pages" is the simple value proposition for consumers to switch.
• Filters: Protecting companies, trademarks, and interpreting the legality of free speech. Someone has to do it, if we're all one people.
• Health transactions: Google has even taken on one of the most sensitive challenges, private health information. And, it's connections to legacy systems that prefer EDI to JSON.

It's clear that Google is making progress. What we've also learned in this review is that the companies biggest asset - people - may scale to solve problems in lightweight ways that entire teams and companies haven't been able to in the past. Perhaps being open, or transparent, gives the company a unique advantage in being prepared for a cloud future.

Is the cloud where the action is?

What verb would you be if you were hired at Google?

Discuss

You know those special amps used by Spinal Tap that go to 11, in order to provide "that extra push over the cliff"? It appears Fox News has gotten a hold of some and hooked them up to its coverage of health care reform.

As the reform bill moved closer to a vote in the House, the Fox News noise machine went into overdrive, hurling every false and misleading claim it could muster.

The week in Fox News health care hysteria began with an oldie-but-goodie -- Steve Doocy, Bill Hemmer, and Bill O'Reilly all claimed or suggested that the bill will, in O'Reilly's words, "require American taxpayers to fund abortion." But it doesn't, at least not beyond what is currently permitted under current law. Fox News, unfortunately, is not alone in repeating this falsehood.

Then, Doocy and Hemmer, joined by Neil Cavuto and several other hosts, jumped on the idea that a legislative procedure the House is reportedly considering to pass the Senate's version of health care reform would allow them to do so without a vote. Wrong again -- the House would need to vote to implement that procedure.

Carl Cameron, however, broke through the noise on this issue, pointing out that the process would simply pass the bill "in one vote instead of two" and that the process "has been used, literally, for centuries" -- indeed, Republicans made copious use of the "self-executing rule" when they controlled Congress. Even Charles Krauthammer conceded that it's constitutional. Still, that didn't keep Alisyn Camerota from scoffing that the rule "might as well be a self-immolating rule."

Fox News then pounced on a survey claiming to have found that 46 percent of primary care physicians would consider leaving their profession if health care reform passes. O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and contributor Dr. Marc Siegel all portrayed the survey as having been published by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

Except it wasn't. The article was written by the physician-recruiting firm that conducted the survey, and it actually appeared in an employment newsletter produced by the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, not the Journal itself. Further, the survey itself was not all that scientific -- done via email contacts taken from the recruiting firm's database -- so any claim that the survey's results accurately reflect the view of the American medical community is dubious at best.

Fox News' Megyn Kelly did eventually note that the survey was "not a scientific poll." But that didn't keep Glenn Beck from insisting -- hours after Kelly corrected the record -- that "The New England Journal of Medicine says that if this bill is passed nearly one-third of doctors will quit practice medicine."

(Beck, meanwhile, is keeping up the long tradition of Fox News hosts pushing partisan political agendas by joining with Republican Rep. Steve King to promote an anti-reform rally in Washington.)

Fox News contributor and serial misleader Dana Perino made her own non-contribution to the health care debate, asserting that the reform bill's Medicare investment tax on those making over $200,000 a year is "so disturbing ... because the people who make that money are the small business owners." In fact, fewer than 1.3 percent of small business owners would be affected by the tax.

When the Congressional Budget Office released new numbers detailing how the reform bill would reduce the deficit by $130 billion over 10 years, Fox News didn't want to talk about that -- it spent far more time highlighting how much the bill would cost instead of how much it would save. And when that didn't seem to work, it tried to discredit the CBO as untrustworthy and unreliable. Never mind that when the CBO issued "favorable" numbers last fall on a Republican health care reform plan, Fox News praised the CBO as "nonpartisan."

The Fox News spin is even confusing its own hosts. Brian Kilmeade can't quite comprehend how a bill can cost money yet reduce the deficit, and Kelly admitted, "I don't understand anything they're talking about when it comes to this potential law."

Fox News' inept war against health care reform, while in keeping with its function as the communications arm of the Republican Party in exile, is making itself look like the Spinal Tap of news. It doesn't really need that "extra push over the cliff" -- after all, that's what it's been speeding toward for years.

At this rate, it probably won't be too long before a Fox anchor spontaneously combusts.

Other stories this week

A whole lot of shaky earthquake claims goin' on at Fox

How much does Fox News oppose health care reform? It's pretending natural disasters didn't happen if they're inconvenient to the anti-reform agenda.

On March 18, Doocy took exception to President Obama's statement that a provision in the health care reform that would help Louisiana cope with Medicaid shortfalls resulting from Hurricane Katrina might also help Hawaii because it "went through an earthquake. "Hold it. What Hawaiian earthquake?" Doocy asked. "There was an earthquake in 1868 that killed 77. There was an earthquake in 1975 that killed two." After noting that the provision applies to states that have suffered a natural disaster "within the last seven fiscal years," Doocy added: "Essentially it boils down to just one state, and that is Louisiana."

Doocy seems to have forgotten that there was an earthquake in Hawaii in 2006. Not only did it cause tens of millions of dollars in damage, the Bush administration "declared a major disaster exists in the State of Hawaii and ordered Federal aid to supplement State and local recovery efforts" as a result of the quake.

But Doocy didn't need to rely on federal agencies for information on the quake -- Fox News reported on it at the time. (Investor's Business Daily similarly ignored its own reporting to suggest there was no recent Hawaii quake.)

It seems that rather than trust the federal government or his own news organization, Doocy chose instead to trust right-wing bloggers, who were spreading the misinformation. That runs counter to a 2007 memo -- issued after Doocy and other Fox hosts falsely claimed that Obama was educated in a madrassa -- in which Fox News vice president John Moody reportedly wrote, "For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC."

Media Matters has written Fox News requesting that Doocy correct the record. We shouldn't have to, since Fox News is supposed to have a "zero tolerance" policy toward on-air mistakes, but then, these are the same folks that ludicrously insisted that a Fox & Friends graphic in which poll numbers added up to 120 percent contained no errors.

The latest right-wing witch-hunt target: Jim Wallis

Fox News has long been a leader in witch hunts against Obama and his administration (or, really, anyone who can be remotely tagged as liberal). Now Glenn Beck, as an extension of his repeated challenged Beck to a debate over social justice, Beck demurred, his vaguely threatening statements making it clear his witch hunt was more important than reasoned debate: "In my time, I will respond. ... Just know the hammer's coming. ... And when the hammer comes, it's going to be hammering hard and all through the night, over and over."

Right-wing website WorldNetDaily, meanwhile, blundered into the breach with a poorly written article that attempted to put words in Wallis' mouth. WND claimed that Wallis was a "champion of communism," even though Wallis has declared communism to be a "failed" system; asserted that Sojourners has published "a slew of radicals" while ignoring that it has also published a slew of conservatives; and alleged that "Sojourners' official 'statement of faith' urges readers to 'refuse to accept [capitalist] structures and assumptions that normalize poverty and segregate the world by class,' " even though the word "capitalist" -- inserted by WND -- actually appears nowhere in the statement. WND even falsely claimed that Wallis "labeled the U.S. 'the great captor and destroyer of human life.' "

Somehow, we suspect that Beck's upcoming assault on Wallis will be just as divorced from reality as WorldNetDaily's.

Erick Erickson joins the "scumbags" at CNN

Should a blogger who once called a retiring Supreme Court justice a "goat f---ing child molester" be rewarded with a regular commentary gig on CNN? Doesn't matter -- the deal's been done.

CNN announced this week that RedState editor Erick Erickson has joined the network as a political contributor, mainly appearing on John King's new show. The network claimed that Erickson is "a perfect fit" for King's show, adding that "Erick is in touch with the very people John hopes to reach."

Media Matters has detailed Erickson's history of outrageous statements, of which the aforementioned is but one.

Predictably, conservatives defended Erickson's new job, his fellow RedStaters among them. One of Erickson's RedState defenders, however, went a tad off-message: "From Non-Conservatives, to Academics and Liberal Elitists, to self-soiling and unprincipled Professional Politicians and firmly-entrenched good ole boys inside the M(ostly) S(cumbags) M(edia), each of these clowns has a tale of doom about the hell we're headed for compliments of CNN's hand basket."

We have to wonder: Does Erickson consider his new CNN colleagues to be "scumbags"?

This week's media columns

This week's media columns from the Media Matters senior fellows: Eric Boehlert examines the media myth of Obama's "falling poll numbers," and Karl Frisch tells you how to annoy Glenn Beck in five minutes or less.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and Digg

Media Matters maintains active online communities on the nation's leading social networking sites. Be sure to join us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and Digg and join in on the discussion.

Media Matters Minute now on YouTube

For some time now, radio shows and stations throughout the country have been carrying the Media Matters Minute, a daily, minute-long recap of our work topped off with the "most outrageous comment" of the day. We encourage you to subscribe (YouTube / iTunes /RSS) to the Minute's daily podcast, hosted by Media Matters' Ben Fishel.

This weekly wrap-up was compiled and edited by Terry Krepel, a senior web editor at Media Matters for America.

This episode of 4MR is brought to you by the Knight Digital Media Center, providing a spectrum of training for the 21st century journalist. Find out more at KDMC's website. It's also underwritten by GoDaddy, helping you set up your own website in a snap with domain name registration, web hosting and 24/7 support. Visit GoDaddy to learn more.

Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at Google TV, the new alliance between Google, Intel, Sony and Logitech to create a new TV or set-top box that will finally connect the TV with the Net in a simple way. Plus, Facebook last week surpassed Google in traffic for the U.S., according to Experian Hitwise, and Facebook referrals to news sites were more loyal visitors than referrals from Google News or the Google search engine. And I asked Just One Question to Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik, getting his take on Google TV.

Check it out:

4mrbareaudio31910.mp3

>>> Subscribe to 4MR <<<

>>> Subscribe to 4MR via iTunes <<<

Listen to my entire interview with James Poniewozik:

Background music is "What the World Needs" by the The Ukelele Hipster Kings via PodSafe Music Network.

Here are some links to related sites and stories mentioned in the podcast:

Google and Partners Seek TV Foothold at NY Times

Google TV Should Finally Push Apple TV Beyond A Hobby at TechCrunch

It's Official - Facebook Rules the Web at PC World

Facebook surpasses Google in weekly traffic at San Jose Mercury News

How Facebook overtook Google to be the top spot on the Internet at Fortune Brainstormtech

Facebook edges past Google for weekly traffic at SFGate's Tech Chronicles

Facebook Visitors Come Back Again and Again at Hitwise blog

If You Tell Them On Facebook, They Will Come...Again and Again at ReadWriteWeb

The Google giant begins to topple at Network World

Check out some of our write-in answers to last week's poll question about what people thought about geo-location services such as Foursquare:

Also, be sure to vote in our poll about what you think about your cable or satellite service:

What do you think about your cable or satellite TV service?answers

Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

This episode of 4MR is brought to you by the Knight Digital Media Center, providing a spectrum of training for the 21st century journalist. Find out more at KDMC's website. It's also underwritten by GoDaddy, helping you set up your own website in a snap with domain name registration, web hosting and 24/7 support. Visit GoDaddy to learn more.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

Kevin Nakao is VP of Mobile & Business Search for WhitePages, a Top 40 Web and Mobile Publisher. You can find him on Twitter, and on the Whitepages Blog where he writes about mobile, local, and social media.

While last year’s SXSW seemed to serve as the “coming out” party for location-based services (LBS), maybe this year’s conference signifies the migration of these platforms into mainstream culture. And perhaps the only real “new” concept to emerge this year is the idea that there is finally a real opportunity to make money via “location.”

Here are five things that companies should consider as they look to utilize location-based services (LBS) as part their mobile strategy.

1. Location Shouldn’t be the Only Goal

From finding the nearest ski slope on REI’s Ski and Snow Report to a nearby movie on Flixter, there are plenty of Top iPhone applications that have incorporated a “lead with the offer, not the capability” philosophy into their mobile product offering to provide a better service. Build the best service first, then add the bells and whistles.

With all the hoopla surrounding location, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that location’s real appeal to advertisers is the fact that with this functionality, you can reach the on-the-go user, who is ready to buy and consume. Just because Twitter and Facebook offer location doesn’t make that valuable or new to advertisers. Location-targeting via IP address has been around a while. For the same reason radio is a great advertising channel for retailers, LBS advertising is also valuable: because it can reach the consumer near the point of sale.

2. The “Long Tail” for User Adoption

Foursquare has clearly emerged as the location darling. Consider the fact that after only one year, they’ve reached 500,000 active users (Foursquare recently tweeted they added 100,000 users in 10 days).

However, if you apply any city’s share of the total U.S. population, the results show some pretty low estimates of Foursquare users in individual localities. What emerges is a very “long tail” — a steep, narrow graph — of local user adoption. This shows why it is important to achieve scale if you hope to see return on investment in the location marketing space.

For example, using these rough estimates of a city’s proportional share of the U.S. population, if a local pet supply store wanted to target people in San Francisco, the estimated reach would be 1,310 Foursquare users. Even if you double this audience estimate, the number is fairly small for even a local marketer. We had to hit around 4 million downloads of the Whitepages iPhone app to achieve the minimum scale needed for advertiser geo-targeting. Today, 80% of our campaigns from major brands are geo-targeted.

Editor’s Note: It’s important to remember that these are just rough estimates. Because Foursquare was initially only available in a handful of major metro areas, the geographic distribution of users may not precisely follow the geographic distribution of the population.

3. Mobile Battery Life is Key

Battery life is the single biggest threat to location. With GPS on, the phone is asking the network where it is, and this chatter can drain battery life — anyone with an iPhone knows what I am referring to. Thus, phone manufacturers will play a critical role in the future of LBS. RIM, the manufacturer of BlackBerry devices, faced this problem early on with the energy-tax of e-mail polling, and as a result, their devices now have some of the best battery life.

Foursquare has helped us move forward here as well. “Check-ins” help to address the issue as they offer efficient geo-triggers without having to keep battery-draining GPS features on at all times.

4. Location Will Be the Battleground of the Mobile OS

Looking forward, I predict the mobile platform wars will be fought with location and maps. This is an important feature that a platform can use as a point of differentiation for consumers and developers.

In anticipation of that battle, Apple purchased mapping company Placebase, and Google is starting to provide unique mapping features like turn-by-turn navigation on its Android devices. The only hope I see for Windows Mobile is if they do something completely revolutionary on the mobile location front. A development like this was alluded to at the recent TED conference with its augmented reality layering of geo-tagged Flickr photos and real-time video integration.

5. Location Pays

At WhitePages, we monetize our mobile services through a mix of premium, national display, and sponsored links for local business. Our effective CPM (revenue per thousand ad impressions) for sponsored local links is $30-$50 — double the effective CPM (eCPM) rate we see for premium display ad campaigns from national brands. The eCPM multiple of local targeted ads over ad network rates is a staggering 10x.

Location-based inventory will also become scarce as Apple recently announced that iPhone apps will not be permitted to access GPS capabilities for advertising alone. There now needs to be some consumer benefit and functionality in order to access a user’s location. Geo-targeted inventory on mobile will continue to be at a high premium with no excess supply or ad networks to drive it down.

Conclusion

It is my hope that by this time next year, SXSW –- the festival of “emerging” music and technology –- will have finally moved on from location. It’s clearly happening now, and if integrated wisely, location will be making companies too much money to be called the “cool kid on the block” any longer

More location-based resources from Mashable:

- 9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing
- 10 Foursquare Apps You Can Use Right Now
- 6 Foursquare Apps We’d Love to See
- 6 Tips for Getting the Most out of Foursquare
- Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Location-Based Throwdown
- Location, Location, Location: 5 Big Predictions for 2010

Tags: android, business, foursquare, geo-tagging, gowalla, iphone, List, Lists, location based advertising, location-based, Longtail, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, small business

In order to have access to iPad testing units, developers and testers had to agree to keep the device tethered to a fixed object in an isolated room with blacked-out windows, according to a report by BusinessWeek.

That’s pretty hardcore. It’s unclear from BusinessWeek’s report if that was a condition enforced before the iPad was unveiled to the public or if it’s something that will be kept up until the April 3 launch date.

Apple is a notoriously secretive company, especially when it comes to new products. Outside of partnerships with content publishers like The New York Times, Wired and The Wall Street Journal who have either confirmed interest or already shown demonstrations of their applications, the few developers that do have access to the iPad are keeping their mouths shut.

It also appears that in order to be on the list for the iPad, developers or companies had to be pretty high on the totem poll. Not even Trip Hawkins, who founded Electronic Arts and once worked at Apple, could get a testing unit for his new company, Digital Chocolate.

Now, not having physical access to the device doesn’t preclude developers from creating apps for the iPad — Apple actually started accepting apps for review today — but it does make refining the app much more difficult.

As was the case with the iPhone, we expect the best iPad apps to be those that can take advantage of multi-touch in ways that just feel better. Gestures and interactions on a bigger screen are probably features that will need to be refined over time — just as they were with the original iPhone.

The degree of Apple’s iPad-related secrecy might sound well, paranoid, but the fact is, at least for now, the company can get away with it. The mobile ecosystem is so hot — especially for the iPhone — that getting on the iPad and getting on early is worth the hoop-jumping for many developers. Some would even to settle for using an emulator until the product is officially launched.

What do you think of Apple’s corporate culture of secrecy? Let us know!

Tags: app store, apple, developers, ipad, secrecy

Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

UK game industry trade body the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association will change its name, aiming for a name that more clearly identifies the business it serves. ELSPA members recently voted to call themselves the UK Interactive Entertainment Association, and the group says the re-brand includes not only a name change, but a focus on new areas of concern within a rapidly growing and changing game industry. The group work on this brand development ...

Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Steve Myers at Poynter gathers some thoughts from journalists about the most important lessons they learned at SXSW.

We narrowed down the results to the most important points:

• Use gamelike features to keep users engaged and refreshing your Web site.
• Work with city citizens and dig deeper into the data that is all around us.
• Manor Labs in Manor, Texas "turned the town of 6,500 people into a virtual R&D lab to tackle major civic innovations via crowdsourcing and game-driven mechanics." Amazing.
• Learn how to support different Web fonts with each browser and create rich graphics on the iPhone without Flash.
• The Deck, an all-sponsorship ad network teaches us to stop selling CPMs and only use sponsorships, so advertisers will "pay for time in front of your audience rather than impressions."
• Infuse creativity into every aspect of your work.
• Learn that vision is our strongest sense, and humans are wired to process images quickly. Move beyond text.
• Social media is exciting. But sites "like Facebook give us a limited set of choices for our participation, and we shouldn't be lulled into a false sense of control."
• "Geeks care about journalism."
• Measure reader engagement in hours, not minutes like online. "That allows for higher ad rates; it's another reason publishers should move faster in developing for tablet devices."
• Don't just shuffle content onto an iPad and add videos and graphics. Really think about reinventing content. And add social media.
• Web applications will probably win out over installed apps. "That may be unpopular to the folks who think iPhone/iPad apps will save journalism or make them rich, but developers are growing weary of developing for three to seven different platforms."
• The Web is accessible everywhere, especially on mobile devices.
• Social gaming is going to be huge. Use it in all aspects of your site, including comments.
• "Those who can't or won't reinvent themselves don't really have a place in a culture that places such a high value on innovation."

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• Here's Why You Should Give A Flying Crap About All The SXSW "Nerd Birds"

Final Fantasy XIII, the latest installment in Square Enix's seminal franchise, has sold over one million units in North America in its first five days -- the company says it's the biggest first-week performance in franchise history. Final Fantasy XIII, notably released on Xbox 360 in addition to PlayStation 3 in Western markets, launched on March 9. The publisher said it sold-in five million units worldwide for initial shipment -- bringing global shipments of the ...

If a developer is entitled to due compensation for their contributions to any project, why would two terminated employees have to sue to get paid? A little over a month ago Jason West and Vince Zampella, two of the lead developers at Infinity Ward and creators of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchise, were terminated by Activision. Several weeks later Jason West and Vince Zampella filed a complaint against the publisher. The complaint alleges ...

A Berlin-based software company is preparing an Intel Atom N450-based e-reader that runs Linux with Android extensions. Billed as the & tablet PC for publishing houses,& Neofonie GmbH's & WePad& tablet sports an 11.6-inch touchscreen, 16GB of flash storage, a SD card, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, and a webcam, says Neofonie....

The e-book war between Amazon.com and Apple is
getting uglier. Dennis Johnson cites a report in Publishers Marketplace (subscription required) that alleges that Amazon.com is telling publishers that if they switch to an agency model (ala Macmillan) , they will lose Amazon as a platform for both e-books and print.

This battle, which in many ways mirrors similar struggles between record labels and online music stores, underscores some of the challenges that moving into widespread digital distribution for a formerly non-digital product can bring.

The Agency Model Conundrum

Recently, Macmillian’s CEO John Sargent explained the agency model, as it relates to e-book sales, in his blog:

“Starting at the end of March, we will move from the ‘retail model’ of selling e-books (publishers sell to retailers, who then sell to readers at a price that the retailer determines) to the ‘agency model’ (publishers set the price, and retailers take a commission on the sale to readers).”

In other words, Macmillan wants to be able to control how much digital books are sold for on a per-book basis. Much like music publishers fought (and eventually won) the right to sell certain digital tracks or digital albums for more (or less, in some cases) than the $0.99 per track/$9.99 per album standard, publishers want that same control.

Amazon disagrees. And while it did acquiesce to Macmillan’s position at the end of January, it apparently has no plans of making those same concessions for future publishers.

In the Publishers Marketplace report, Michael Cader writes:

“At least one independent publisher of scale was told categorically by Amazon in a recent phone call initiated by the retailer that Amazon would not negotiate agency selling terms with any other publishers outside of the five initial Apple partners. This publisher was told that if they switched to an agency model for e-books, Amazon would stop selling their entire list, in print and digital form. In conversation, Amazon is said to have reiterated that as matter of policy they are declining to negotiate an agency model with any publisher outside of the five who have already announced agreements with Apple’s iBookstore.”

In other words, the agreements that have been made with the five publishers signed to work with Apple — Macmillan, Harper Collins, Penguin, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster — will not be passed on to smaller publishers.

It seems even the agreement with the other four publishers outside of Macmillan (known as Agency Four) isn’t set in stone.

Cader also writes:

“The indications are that if the Agency Four have not finalized new digital sales agreements with Amazon prior to the launch of Apple’s iPad, they could face delisting from direct sale at Amazon, as Macmillan did.”

Translation: If those publishers don’t finalize a new digital agreement with Amazon before the launch of the iPad, they risk being removed from Amazon.com

Amazon Is Biggest Now, But For How Long?

Because it is both the biggest seller of e-books and print books, Amazon has enormous power in the publishing industry. However, it’s unclear how long it will be able to play hardball with publishers, especially as formidable competitors like Apple (with iTunes) and Google emerge.

Apple, interestingly, held a reverse stance with music executives for many years before finally changing course in January of 2009 with the introduction of variable pricing. However, one reason Apple was able to exert so much influence over record labels pricing was because until Amazon launched its service (again, Amazon took the reverse approach with music, letting publishers set variable pricing for tracks and albums), there was no real competitor in the digital music space.

Amazon isn’t quite as lucky. First, e-books have been around for years and are available in a variety of formats from a variety of different storefronts. In fact, Amazon sold digital books long before it introduced the Kindle.

The e-book market has evolved much more quickly than the digital music space, which leaves less wiggle room for retailers, like Amazon, to exert pressure.

However, make no mistake, for smaller publishers, the risk of losing listings on Amazon.com is still probably a big enough threat to have an effect.

We’ll keep following this situation as it develops.

[via John Gruber]

Reviews: Google

Tags: amazon, apple, business, ebook price war, ebooks, ipad, Kindle, Macmillan

At least one independent publisher of scale was told categorically by Amazon...

Wired is leading the magazine-to-iPad charge with a great looking app, but it's also reverting to some back lock-in habits. Instead of trapping content and readers within a space -- a true exercise in futility -- Wired and other publishers should go the other way with their iPad offerings: create more web hooks, not less.

ELSPA, The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association, has announced that it intends to change its name to the UK Interactive Entertainment Association.

The decision was made by its membership today at the trade body’s Extraordinary General Meeting.

read more

Until now, anybody who wanted to implement real-time ads from OneRiot's RiotWise network had to get these ads through OneRiot's API and create a customized user interface around these ads. This severely limited OneRiot's appeal for website owner who wanted to experiment with real-time ads on their sites and services but were looking for a plug and play solution. Today, OneRiot is launching a new set of real-time ads that website owners can just plug into their sites. These dynamic ads will refresh automatically and display relevant ads based on the topics that are trending on the Internet right now.

Sponsor

For now, these new RiotWise display ad units are only available by requesting access directly from OneRiot. Chances are that the company will make it easier to get access to these ads in the near future. OneRiot is targeting these new ad units at services that are already in the real-time ecosystem, including social networks, real-time meme trackers and other social sharing services. Some of the services that currently use OneRiot's ads through the company's API include Digsby, ÜberTwitter and a number of real-time search engines.

According to OneRiot these ads lead to "click through rates at four times industry norms." While we can't verify this data, it doesn't come as a surprise that these ads, which usually point to interesting and relevant content on OneRiot's partner sites would have high click-through rates, especially if users are already on news site or are using a browser-based Twitter tool. On the other hand, we also don't know what kind of payout website owners can expect from these ads, so a higher click-through rate could still mean that publishers end up earning just as much money from RiotWise as they currently do from AdSense or similar programs.

Discuss