media
Google’s Brin: Make smartphone apps searchable
Sep 9th
For more than a decade, 
Google has reigned supreme as the main gateway to online information.
But with consumers increasingly accessing the Internet through specialized apps on smartphones like Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Web search engine could be at risk of playing a smaller role in the Internet’s next phase.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has an answer: Make apps searchable.
On the sidelines of the press event in San Francisco to unveil Google Instant on Wednesday, Brin offered some thoughts on the future of apps and search.
“I do think with respect to apps, it would be nice to adopt some kind of URL conventions, so that even content within apps is in fact searchable, and I think that it would be nice to adopt some kind of standard in that respect, and that would benefit all search engines and all users.”
Has Google had talks with any organizations about making this happen?
“I don’t think we’ve pushed too far yet, because typically most of the apps that do surface content are usually reflections of websites today anyway. But if there starts to be more unique content in apps, I think that would be a nice thing.”
Do US Open organizers really think the iPad is dangerous?
Sep 9th
The organizers of the US Open pride themselves on using technology to help tennis fans enjoy the sport more both inside and outside the stadium.
But, as far as iPad is concerned the tournament’s tech love affair only goes so far, as the grand slam organizers appear to have banned the device from the stadium itself.
Some visitors to Arthur Ashe Stadium learned about this the hard way; by being turned away from the gates when security guards found them carrying the offending gadgets.
Given that the event organizers take space on their website to boast about their iPhone app, it was not immediately clear why its bigger cousin the iPad should be forbidden.
One security worker explained to a disappointed fan of both tennis and the iPad that the ban was due to concerns about terrorists. “They’re using iPads to detonate things.”
Really? A US open official was not immediately available on Wednesday to verify this was the tournament’s official stance.
Hidden in the security section of the visitor’s guide to the US Open website is a list of items prohibited from the event including computers and laptops as well as video recorders.
But the irony was not lost on tech reporters and executives attending the game on Tuesday night because US Tennis Association has been reasonably forward looking when it comes to technology. The event’s tech boasts include an augmented reality iPhone app that IBM developed for the USTA. That app promises to warn you about the quickest bathroom lines or off what’s happening in other courts if you point your phone in the right direction.
You could also enjoy the action of simultaneous matches by flicking between video streams on devices such as iPad.
Yet even Joe Ambeault, a product development executive for Verizon, explained how he was held up on his way to Verizon’s suite at the stadium because his bag included an array of gadgets such as an iPad, a laptop and some smartphones.
Then Ambeault went on to discuss how devices like iPads could be used to expand the use of Verizon’s FiOS video and internet service and improve enjoyment of sporting events, or at least those events where they are allowed.
(Reuters Photo: Venus Williams celebrating a win that gives her a spot in the US Open semi-final)
Time Warner Cable’s unique ESPN Web deal
Sep 4th
Many media business journalists let out a collective sigh of relief at the news that Time Warner Cable had finally inked its deal 
with Walt Disney to keep carrying its programming, including ABC, Disney channels and various ESPN networks. The programming fee negotiations had gone late into the night past their Wednesday midnight deadline and hacks, who had seen this movie before, were just starting to tire of waiting for another midnight watch.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the deal is that Time Warner Cable’s ESPN customers will now have access to ESPN3.com, a website ESPN uses to show more than 3,500 live events, including matches from the World Cup this summer.
This is unlike other ESPN3 deals which have typically been tied to the cable operator’s Internet service provider. In those cases, ESPN3 would only be accessible to ISP customers of the cable operator.
Time Warner Cable’s deal comes under the auspices of TV Everywhere, the project that Time Warner Inc and Comcast Corp have been trying to convince the cable industry to support.
ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU will also be available online to authenticated Time Warner Cable customers as part of this deal.
“We wanted to make sure this was a product available to our video customers who get ESPN, and that they wouldn’t have to pay extra for it,” said Time Warner Cable spokesman Justin Venech.
(Photo: Reuters)
Apple TV? Google TV? Here’s a primer
Sep 2nd
As the world knows (perhaps too well) by now, Apple unveiled its latest version of Apple TV on Wednesday. Maybe you’re not familiar with Apple TV (even Steve Jobs admits it didn’t sell all that well) or maybe you’re just confused about the whole web-to-television thing (who could blame you?). And how does Google TV fit into all of this? Reporter Liana B. Baker gives us a breakdown.
COST:
Apple: $99
Google: Not yet announced
HOW IT WORKS:
Apple: Apple TV is a compact box that hooks into TVs and allows viewers to stream shows and movies that they have rented or downloaded from iTunes. It requires an Internet connection and can access YouTube, Flickr and other sites. It can stream music from iTunes and play shows or movies that have been downloaded on separate devices from iTunes. Apple TV can be controlled through iPods, iPhones and iPads after downloading an app.
Google: Google TV will allow viewers to search and watch programs from the Internet and their DVR recordings. Sony TVs and blu-ray players, as well as Logitech TVs, will come with Google TV installed. A separate stand-alone device is also available. The software has a Chrome Web browser built in so users can access whatever videos, photos, music and games are online. The Android Market will be on Google TV starting in 2011.
AVAILABILITY:
Apple: Chief Executive Steve Jobs said Apple TV would be available in a month, and the devices can be pre-ordered now.
Google: Unknown date this fall.
CONTENT:
Apple: TV shows will cost 99 cents to rent, movies will cost $4.99 to $2.99 to rent.
Google: All free online content can be accessed. DISH Network subscribers can also browse and watch their content with the device.
PARTNERS:
Apple: Netflix, News Corp, Walt Disney Co
Google: Sony, Logitech, Intel and DISH Network
TRACK RECORD:
Apple: This is the second incarnation of the Apple TV. Jobs has said the first version, released in 2006, has “never been a huge hit.”
Google: This is the first Google TV of its kind for the company.
War of Words: Google’s Android sharpens speech-recognition in duel with Apple’s iPhone
Aug 13th
Google fired the latest salvo in the smartphone war with Apple on Thursday, jazzing up the allure of its Android phones with new voice recognition capabilities.
Google’s new Voice Search feature lets users of Android phones quickly send text messages, play online music or find a restaurant’s phone number by barking commands into the handset.
Anyone who’s ever been behind the wheel on a long drive, or running through an airport carrying multiple bags, will recognize the appeal of firing off a quick missive by saying something like “send text to Marlo, I’m running ten minutes late,” instead of stopping to type everything out.
Google wants to maintain Android’s reputation for voice recognition – the company said on Thursday that 25 percent of US users of Android 2.0 phones currently use voice recognition to conduct Web searches – as Apple hints at its interest in bringing speech features to the iPhone.
In April Apple bought Siri, which makes an app that allows iPhone users to find restaurant address or movie listings online with voice commands.
The competition between Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android has heated up during the past year, with the two companies racing to add unique features to differentiate their respective products.
Apple has sold more than three million iPhone 4 phones – which feature special video calling technology dubbed FaceTime – since releasing the product in late June.
But Google said recently that its hardware partners like Motorola and HTC are now selling more than 200,000 Android devices a day. And in the second quarter, Android became the No.1 smartphone operating system in the United States by market share according to research firm Gartner.
In addition to the new voice capabilities Google also released a new product on Thursday called Chrome to Phone, that allows a person to transfer Web information – say directions to a hotel – from their PC browser to their Android phone.
One interesting side note on the speech recognition front: attentive readers will recall Reuters’ stunning discovery in January that Google’s voice recognition technology automatically censored curses and other offensive words on the Nexus One phone. Well, on the sideline of Google’s event announcing the new mobile features on Thursday, Google senior software engineer Mike LeBeau informed us that newer versions of Android now let users turn off the auto-censorship feature. So go ahead and cuss to your heart’s content.
Universal Music pulls videos off MTV website
Aug 7th
Universal Music Group has pulled its music videos off of MTV’s websites in a dispute over syndication rights for Universal’s co-owned music site Vevo.
With Universal Music’s previous online music video contract with MTV Networks ending on Aug 1, the music company had planned to use Vevo as the distribution platform for its music videos. But the problem for MTV is that would mean adverts around the videos would be sold by Vevo, not MTV, something the music television business found difficult to agree to.
Vevo was launched in December by co-owners Universal Music and Sony Music Entertainment as a dedicated online venue for premium quality music videos – an MTV for the digital age if you like. It features music from EMI as well but Warner Music Group is yet to ink a deal.
Here’s what MTV thinks of Universal’s decision:
For almost 30 years, MTV has enjoyed long and colorful partnerships with all the music labels, including UMG and their talented roster of artists on MTV, VH1 and CMT. As the industry evolves, we continue to seek out new and innovative ways to connect artists with their fans that are beneficial to everyone. However, during our recent discussions with VEVO, we were unable to reach a fair and equitable agreement for rights to stream UMG artists’ video content. As a result, UMG has elected to pull their music videos from our web sites. We are disappointed by this move and sincerely hope that UMG will work with us toward a fair resolution and allow their artists to once again connect with the millions of music fans who visit MTV.com, VH1.com and CMT.com every day.
Here’s what Universal Music says:
“MTVN has been unwilling to negotiate a fair syndication deal with Vevo to carry our artists’ videos and consequently our videos will not be shown on their online properties. We believe that using Vevo as our online music video syndication platform is the best way to maximize revenue for our artists, our songwriters and ourselves, while bringing our videos to the widest possible audience. In less than 8 months since its launch, Vevo has already become the web’s #1 rated video network with over 49 million unique visitors monthly, dramatically eclipsing those on MTV’s online properties, while attracting scores of major advertisers and tens of millions in advertising dollars. As a result, our artists are enjoying tremendous exposure on Vevo on YouTube and Vevo.com, and will enjoy even more as Vevo continues to complete syndication deals supplementing the existing arrangements with leading destinations as AOL and CBS Interactive.”
And here are some clips of MTV’s hugely popular Jersey Shore still up on Vevo:
Washington Post Co: We are (usually) an education company
Aug 6th
For the past couple of years, The Washington Post Co has been trying to hammer home to Wall Street that it’s an education and media company, brushing aside its namesake newspaper or anything related to print. That includes Newsweek, the magazine it owned for almost 50 years. The Washington Post earlier this week offloaded the newsweekly to 91-year-old stereo magnate Sidney Harman founder of Harman International Industries.
The move to rebrand the company is understandable since its Kaplan education unit –known mostly to teens everywhere in need of SAT preparation — pulls in roughly 70 percent of total revenue.
Alas the Washington Post is probably rethinking that spin. In its second quarter results released this morning, the company warned that a proposed rule change from the U.S. Department of Education could have a “material adverse effect” on Kaplan’s operating results. The rule, which is still finding its way through the approval process, would adversely affect the test-prep division’s ability to retain admissions and financial aid advisers among other things, the company said in a statement.
Washington Post shares plunged about 10 percent today making it one of the biggest percentage losers on the New York Stock Exchange. And yet, the Washington Post has some familiar company as Harman International is also one of the biggest losers of day.
(Photo: Reuters)
Will Blackberry “Torch” catch fire?
Aug 3rd
The makers of the Blackberry, Research In Motion, unveiled a new version of the smartphone with a touchscreen and slideout keyboard, which is aimed squarely at the iPhone. It runs on AT&T’s network and is called “Torch” –but will it catch fire in world of popular consumer gadgets?
The event occurred as attendees and analysts also wondered how Research in Motion would respond to questions about the security of its messaging system.
Check out the live blog that we conducted during the Blackberry event — with a little help from our friends using Twitter — with lots of opinions and fact about the new product.
Charlie Ergen: Satellite cowboy, TV viewer, pitchman
Aug 3rd
Charlie Ergen is best known in media business circles as the straight talking homely founder of satellite TV provider Dish Network Corp. He’s often been disarmingly honest on quarterly conference calls with Wall Street analysts by admitting that he had personally taken his eye off the ball when the company was losing customers a few years ago or putting his annual family vacation ahead of being present on the quarterly call.
Well Dish Network’s marketing team is hoping that Ergen’s southern gentleman charm can win over new customers or at least keep old ones in the pay-TV wars versus DirecTV Group and the various US cable operators.
Ergen appears in a new in-house produced campaign below talking about his pride in the company he founded, his “embarrassing” picture from his early days, and its recent success in customer service etc.
Dish Chief Marketing Officer Ira Bahr said that his boss is a “plain-speaking, easy-to-understand American TV viewer” just like the kinds of people the company is trying to win over in a business sector where there is so much “yelling and price competition” between the various players (Dish has been as guilty as anyone in that respect as you can see here and here).
But outside of crisis management does recruiting the boss as your top pitchman really work for a major national brand campaign? The closest most recent example would be mobile phone company Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, who first hit our screens in a black & white stylish campaignsoon after he joined in 2008. Sprint’s fortunes haven’t exactly improved since the end of 2007 the last quarter before he joined the company. Sprint has lost more than 5 million customers, though the rate of those losses appear to have narrowed in recent quarters. Bahr argues that a professional CEO as pitchman doesn’t have quite the same marketing resonance as that of a founder CEO like Ergen and Dish is currently on the up having already added 700,000 customers in the last year or so.
But what does branding professional Allen Adamson think of Dish’s ad spot?
Adamson, who is managing director of branding agency Landor Associates and author of BrandDigital, said: “It’s a fairly tricky thing to do. Personalities of CEOs don’t necessarily always match up with the brand and ultimately may not be persuasive. It really is about how credible and powerful a communicator the CEO is. (Ergen’s) techy personal matches his office with model rocket by the window and lends some credibility but I still feel that he is not the best way to tell the Dish story”
Ergen has proved doubters and experts wrong before, his marketing team will be hoping he does so again.
Nielsen Says – In: social networking; Out: email
Aug 2nd
Anyone with a Facebook account knows how addictive social networking can be. But a new report by analytics firm Nielsen illustrates just how central social networking has become in the Average Joe’s day-to-day life.
Nearly a quarter of Americans’ online time is now spent on social networks, according to Nielsen. And all that time spent on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter is coming at the expense of traditionally popular Web activities, particularly email.
Email accounted for 8.3 percent of Americans’ online time in June, down from 11.5 percent a year earlier.
The total number of minutes that Americans spent using email in June plunged 34 percent year-over-year, while the total number of minutes devoted to social networking jumped 31 percent year-over-year.
“When you’re on Facebook, you can do instant messaging, you can email and share content,” said Nielsen analyst David Martin. “Maybe an assumption is that social networks are directly displacing some of these traditional channels for communication online.”
That’s not great news for the Yahoos, Googles and Microsofts of the world, which have built substantial email businesses over the years.
To make matters worse, Nielsen said the “portal” category — web sites like Yahoo or AOL — represented 4.4 percent of Americans’ online time in June, compared to 5.5 percent a year earlier.
Nielsen conducted the study by monitoring the daily surfing habits of 220,000 people in the U.S.
Social game companies like Zynga and Playfish are also benefitting from the trend.
Online games, which increasingly means social games, overtook email to become the second most popular activity online after social networking, accounting for 10.2 percent of time online in June 2010 vs 9.3 percent in June 2009.
Of course, online time isn’t a requirement for business success. Search ranked only as the seventh most popular activity, accounting for a relatively scant 3.5 percent of Americans’ online time. Yet Google remains the world’s most successful Internet company, with nearly $24 billion in annual revenue.
And there’s still hope for email and portals. Email remains the most popular activity on mobile phones, with Americans’ spending 41.6 percent of their online time on email, up from 37.4 percent a year earlier. And phone users spent more time on Web portals than they did on social networks in June, though Nielsen noted that the gap between the two is narrowing.